Gallery Isabelle Van Den Eynde presents: Any Resemblance to Actual Persons, Living or Dead, is Purely Coincidental, an exhibition by Zoulikha Bouabdellah. She was born in 1977 to Algerian parents, and moved from Algiers to Paris as a teenager. She now lives and works in Morocco. Cross-cultural influences and tensions originating in Bouabdellah's upbringing are central aspects of the artist’s experiences as she perpetually searches for freedom from the political, social and moral restraints that surround individuals. Her works are tenacious explorations of the rift between public and private, the visible and the unspoken.
Bouabdellah’s much anticipated new exhibition reflects on reality through the guise of fiction, with film, works on paper, installation and sculpture. The show is named after the illuminated billboard work that welcomes, warns and appeases the audience upon entry with the words ‘Any Resemblance to Actual Persons, Living or Dead, is Purely Coincidental.’
Bouabdellah presents a series of grimacing faces, cut out of black paper with red sequins bursting out, that play with the original meaning of a grimace as a mask. These Grimaces, instead of masking reality, reveal it, and in doing so, reveal that our daily facades are in fact the masks concealing our personal expressions. In another work, she reclaims The Scream by Edward Munch (completed 1910), which manifested his violently unsettling fear that foreshadowed the eruption of World War One. Bouabdellah’s works are quasi-self portraits that express an insuppressible facet of both the artist’s and womankind’s feelings of profound anxiety and frustration towards the inevitable, the actual, and the expected.
Two circular mashrabiyas, wryly entitled ‘The Wheel of Fortune’, sardonically glorify ornamentation by concealing images of scantily-clad, objectified women behind delicate latticework. In line with the true function of the mashrabiyah as a partition, the artist also features an installation piece of the eight gates of paradise, three of which will be on show, each with strings of beads dangling down to the floor, and a pair of red shoes boldly crossing the threshold between reality and fantasy, man and woman, concealment and acknowledgement.
Bouabdellah’s Pop Mosques, re-introduced in this exhibition multiplied and diversified to reveal fifteen buildings from across the globe, Burkina-Faso to Lebanon and Germany, are similarly a zealous effort to sideline fantasy, ideology and restrictive preconceptions to focus on reality. She depicts the contours of fifteen mosques, celebrating each one’s individuality by highlighting only the architecture and the role of the building as a popular place in communities worldwide.
The artist will also include a film of a Yemeni woman dancing, projected onto a flimsy sheet of paper dangling quaveringly from the ceiling. The video captures a moment of freedom and inspiration, and yet the artist accompanies the video with an audio recording that muddies the radiance of the dancer by raising questions about her private life. The overall experience stimulates questions about the complexity of unifying intimate experiences and personal perspectives with public preconceptions and expectations.
The exhibition declares from the outset that things are not what they appear to be. By constructing a form of theatre, Bouabdellah shows us that not only is reality not what it first seems, but also that it is constructed, and as such, changeable.
