Caméléon Club — La Galerie, centre d’art contemporain — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: February 2 → March 30, 2019

As part of his residency at La Galerie, poet and artist Tarek Lakhrissi is presenting for his first solo exhibition a fictional, performative ensemble freely inspired by science fiction. Taking works of imaginative speculation as his starting point, he calls for a future marked by emancipation and interaction between physical bodies and bodies of knowledge. In a setting transformed into an allegorical spacecraft, he conjures up a poetically minoritarian, queer frame of reference in which artworks and invitations to participate shape the contours of a utopia-to-come.

Lakhrissi’s practice derives from and feeds into language and its performative dimension: what it does and does not allow. In his poetry, he addresses language — its self-evidence and its limitations — via iterative resort to English, Arabic and French. Sometimes accomplished, sometimes faltering, these ventures into translation and transition aim to put pressure on language through subjective, marginal experience constantly reperspectivised and reworked by its different voicings.

Poet, queer and Arab, Tarek Lakhrissi has his roots in a language at once cultivated, inherited, assimilated, familiar, foreign and vulnerable; and whose repetition, as in a learning process, also exhausts it. His narratives are the bed in which endless amorous frolicking is played out between speech’s power of command and its liberatory re-articulation; in which the invitees are in turn slang, popular culture and theoretical allusion.

Guest curator: Thomas Conchou