Partitions (Performances) — Julien Creuzet / Ghita Skali — Fondation d’entreprise Pernod Ricard — Lecture — Slash Paris

Past: Monday, February 19, 2018 at 7 PM

This third edition of Partitions (Performances) offers a chance to reconsider the narrative forms of a hybrid—or one might say creole—thought that ventures to blend multiple branches. Ghita Skali and Julien Creuzet reinvent narrative forms by combining various elements and sources, forming a polyphonic story. With the fourth episode of the Kit Kat Project, Ghita Skali recounts the life of a Cairo neighborhood, while Julien Creuzet adds a final “underground” voice to those broadcast in his exhibition.

Ghita Skali / The Kit Kat Project — Episode 4: An anthropological, historical and mythical exploration of a Cairo district

Ghita Skali recounts the history of a Cairo district by presenting historical figures, fictional characters and the district’s inhabitants, figuring out how this place and its multiple identities have evolved over time. A dancer, Kitty Foustaty, and her cabaret Kitty Kat, a book by Ibrahim Aslan, a chocolate brand, Bonaparte… all of these threads are followed to evoke the Kit Kat district. Between archive and fiction, Orientalism and Occidentalism, research and free association, the artist weaves a narrative rhizome about this district.

Ghita Skali was born in Casablanca (Morocco). She has exhibited in Italy (Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin), in Egypt (Wekalet Behna in Alexandria and the OFF Biennale Cairo), in Morocco (Rabat: Le Cube—Independent Art Room and the CDG Foundation; Casablanca: the Abderrahman Slaoui Foundation Museum and Galerie VC) and in France (Printemps de Septembre in Toulouse and Résonance—Biennale de Lyon). In 2017, she received a young Arab artist grant from Al Mawred Al Thaqafy.

Her projects stem from meticulous investigations into forgotten or obliterated media stories revealing power relations based on mythologies that express systems of belief and authority. Among other models, she borrows from the codes of TV reporting, performance lectures and vox pop interviews to create her hybrid projects. It is not so much a matter of bringing out a truth, but more about mapping all of the possible branches of a narrative, the contradictions and multiple rumors that created it.

Julien Creuzet / _Polydipsia, I wept rain…_

To close his exhibition at the Fondation d’entreprise Ricard, entitled “Toute la distance de la mer, pour que les filaments à huile des mancenilliers nous arrêtent les battements de cœur. — La pluie a rendu cela possible (…)” [“All the distance of the sea, so that the sebaceous filaments of the manchineel stop our heartbeats.—The rain made this possible (…)”], Julien Creuzet responds to the voices that infiltrate his exhibition, with an extra voice, an underground one, conveyed through a reading within the exhibition. Julien Creuzet’s work is both poetic and political. Inspired by Édouard Glissant’s archipelagic thought, it is made up of visual and sound collages that are open to a variety of possible interpretations. These installations are tools for circulating thoughts and perspectives, which a title in the form of a poem often orients but never restricts.

Julien Creuzet was born in Blanc-Mesnil in 1986. He lives and works in Fontenay-sous-Bois. He is a graduate of Studio national des arts contemporains—Le Fresnoy in Tourcoing. In recent years his work has been shown in solo exhibitions at the Frac Basse-Normandie in Caen (2015), the contemporary art center in Juvisy-sur-Orge , Galerie Dohyang Lee in Paris (2013 and 2016), and the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin (2012). He participated in the Biennale de Lyon and the Hors-Pistes festival at the Centre Pompidou (2017), as well as the Biennale de Dakar and the Ateliers Internationaux program of the Frac des Pays de la Loire (2016).

Performances proposed by Christian Alandete.