Sabrina Belouaar — al mahr — La Galerie, centre d’art contemporain — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: May 14 → July 23, 2022

Embracing sculpture, photography, video and installation, the artistic vocabulary that Sabrina Belouaar (born in 1986, lives and works in Paris) has developed investigates, with sensitivity, the way our social and cultural identities are constructed, how they echo and collide with each other in a continuous back and forth — from the Maghreb to Western Europe, from the centre to the periphery. The artist does not hesitate to question our preconceptions by revealing the unspoken power dynamics at play in both political and familial spheres.

For this exhibition, “al mahr”, which in Arabic means “dowry”, Sabrina Belouaar presents a project in La Galerie’s space that she began in 2017, studies of women who clandestinely resell jewellery on the streets of Algiers. Called the delalates, these women have often found themselves in a precarious situation (widowed, rejected, divorced, etc.), to the point of being forced to sell jewellery on the pavement, often from their dowry, given to young Algerian women when they marry.

This exhibition is supported by the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture.