Waiting for Omar Gatlato: Contemporary Art from Algeria and its Diaspora. Curated By Natasha Marie Llorens Opening Reception: Friday, October 25, 2019, 6 – 8pm On view October 26 – March 15, 2020 Design credit: Eider Corral    Waiting for Omar Gatlato is a survey of contemporary art by Algerian artists and by those in its diaspora. The project expressly refuses thematic axes, such as “memory” or “exile”, “the violence of the civil war”, in favor of the open-ended framework Algerian film critic and lawyer Wassyla Tamzali sets out in her eponymous volume, published in Algiers in 1979. In her book, Tamzali argues that Merzak Allouache’s 1976 feature film Omar Gatlato represents a turn toward the individual in Algerian society, their desires and the contradictions they struggle with. This exhibition proposes that an analogous ouverture vers le quotidien is taking place in today’s art scenes and, indeed, even in its streets. The Algerian context is hard to integrate into a broad regional history because it is exceptional, even when viewed together with its North African neighbors, Tunisia and Morocco. The specificity of its long, intimate colonial relationship to France, the fact that it experienced a violent Islamic coalition movement in the 1990s, decades […]

OFFICINE DELL’IMMAGINE HALIDA BOUGHRIET   « Out of Place » May 16 – July 13, 2019 http://www.officinedellimmagine.com   From 16th May to 13th July 2019, Officine dell’Immagine in Milan is pleased to present the second solo exhibition dedicated to Halida Boughriet, one of the most interesting artists of the emerging contemporary scene. Curated by Silvia Cirelli, the exhibition Out of Place will present recent work by this talented artist in an Italian exclusive. Already recognised internationally for exhibitions at Centre Pompidou and Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, the Rabat Biennale, the Los Angeles Depart Foundation, Documenta 14 and the 11th Dak’Art Biennial, Boughriet is surprising for her rare expressive eclecticism, ranging from photography to video and performance, in which she herself becomes the spokesperson for the artistic message. Always attentive to the exploration of socio-cultural, behavioural and geopolitical themes concerning current cultural situation, Boughriet translates the precariousness of a historical moment marked by a sense of uprooting, an absence of communication between people and by the need for belonging. Coming to authentic emotional essentiality and completely laying bare human vulnerabilities, this young artist’s narrative sees the body as the focal point of the entire creative journey. With the spasmodic urgency of […]