Fragments d'objets habités par Sadek Rahim

Solo exhibition from April 20 to May 20, 2024 Opening April 20, 6 to 8 pm Through drawing, artist Sadek Rahim tackles subjects that are close to his heart: memory, transmission and the displaced, dislocated object from one territory to another. Starting with Josef Koudelka?s phrase, "Ruins are not the past, they are the future. Everything around us, one day, will be in ruins", the artist exhumes fragments of objects during his wanderings, drawing and photographing them to give them a second life. A collector of books and magazines from the 19th century to the present day, he draws inspiration from them for his drawings and other works. In his studio, furniture from another era, books, catalogs, tools and canvases accumulated over the years and unearthed in village markets around the city of Oran rub shoulders. A whole territory that carries the stories of families, men and women. Every object, every fragment of artifact or tool tells this universal story, a kind of archaeology of memory. A story of displacement, migration, war and peace. Old road maps, personal photographs that once belonged to a whole that no longer exists or is now separate from it, veritable "shards" from another age, reflections of a distant past, ghosts of past lives. Sadek Rahim conjures up the memory and myth of a bygone era. His artistic practice, in itself, is a form of wandering through the objects and artifacts of another time, drawing them, giving them a second life - the paradox of so-called "still life" works - and thus reactivating this element of art history. These "Still lives", preferable to the French expression, evoke duration and life, the tenacious life of memories. The artist gathers and fabricates fragments of memory: photographs and drawings of obsolete mechanical debris, statuettes, gleaned knick-knacks, all traces of a buried past. Ruined villages, once prosperous but now silent, bear witness to the movements and mutations of people as they respond to the needs and hazards of life. Objects are not transported by the wind, they are not seeds or pollen. They occupy the land and freeze it in the rust of time gone by. It is man, in this case the artist, driven by his inspiration, who moves them, giving them a language without words, through the medium of drawing, the basis par excellence and foundation of every work of art. Sadek Rahim believes that the form of this medium, however "primitive" it may be, reveals the essence of his subject, through the contrast of black and white, and the play of light and shadow. It's a kind of anthropology of the drawn object, recounting little human stories and the memories it borrows for the time it takes to create. A journey through the history of objects and humans, an archaeology of the future. Comments on the formal structure of the work Sadek Rahim subtly reveals his views on the structure of works, while exploring periods of Algerian history. A history marked by a multitude of invasions and conflicts. Over the centuries, Algeria has witnessed the settlement of various peoples, each representing a different cultural stratum and tradition, which Sadek Rahim analyzes with finesse, drawing on the words of Anatole Thibault: "It is only with the past that we can build the future Sadek Rahim offers us another way of presenting works of art, based on Fernand Braudel's theory of the comparative study of historical periods. The artist captures several temporal "capsules", brought together in diptychs: the hunted object from a certain era, the text based on the words of a witness from another era, the drawing, today, in the artist?s own hand, Here and now, Hic and nunc, a process from point to line for an open loop on the history and future of a country from which the artist draws all his inspiration, and whose present he wants to understand by the yardstick of the past. "I called on two philosophers, Oswald Spengler1 and Fernand Braudel2, to give a formal structure to each work - drawing, object suspended in a frame, text - to shed light on different periods of Algerian history. 1-For Oswald Spengler, civilizations follow a trajectory similar to that of biological organisms: youth, maturity and inevitable decline towards the end. 2-Fernand Braudel's theory encourages the analysis of similarities and differences between different eras to identify long-term trends in history. SADEK RAHIM was born in Oran in 1971. He lives and works in Oran, Algeria. A conceptual visual artist, he is co-founder of La Biennale Méditerranéenne d'Art Contemporain d'Oran (2010) and of the 1st Salon du Dessin Contemporain d'Oran (2012). After a sabbatical year in Syria, he began studying at the Beirut Fine Arts School in Lebanon in 2000. He then moved to London to study for a Master?s degree in Visual Arts at the Central Saint Martin? School of Arts and Design. On 2003, he graduated from the same school. Since then, he has exhibited his work in solo and group shows in various countries and capitals: Beirut, London, Algiers, Paris, Dubai, New York... Exhibitions : Facing Horizon, FI commission, YSL & Pierre Bergé, CCO, Oran - 2013/2024 Cities Under Quarantine: The Mailbox Project exhibition, Mathaf, Arab Museum of Modern Art Doha Qatar, until 5.3.2024 Take a Bow, Chaillot Expérience, Chaillot - Théâtre national de la Danse, Paris france starting from 19.11.2023. Touriste! (Le Grand Tour) part of BIENALSUR, Babel Mallorca art center, Mallorca Spain, September 18 / October 03, curatos Marie Deparis-Yafil & Arnaud Cohen La Chair du Monde, Mamia Bretesche Gallery Cities & Artists Arles, Arles,July 3 / 22, 2023 Quelque part entre le silence et les parlers, Maison des arts Malakoff, Paris, June 26 / November 28, 2021 / curator Florian Gaité Alger, archipel des libertés, FRAC Centre-Val de Loire, Orléans, June 4/ January 2022 / curator Abdelkader Damani & Nadira Laggoune Cosmogonies, MO.CO., Montpellier, Oct 2021/ curator Nicolas Bourriaud Cities Under Quarantine - The Mailbox Project, Villa Romana, Florence, September 4 / December 18 2021 / curator Abed Al Kadiri XXI Bienal Internacional de arte de Santa Cruz de la Sierra, the fourth wall / curator Mo Reda, February-March 2020 Waiting for Omar Gatlato: A Survey of Algerian Contemporary art, The Wallach Art Gallery New York, 26/10/2019 - 14/03/2020 / curator Natasha Marie Llorens Gravity³, MAMO Museum, Oran, July 7 / Sep 30. 2019 / curator Marie Deparis The Exile Pavilion 03- Layover at Saint-Louis, Senegal - with the Dakar Biennial - French Institut of Saint Louis - May/July 2018 / curators Marie Deparis & Mounir Fatmi Art Dubai with Al Marhoon gallery, Art Dubai 2017, Dubai The gallery: Guidelines Enthusiasm and Demands! Because creation is matter, form and light. Because artists are sensors for signs of the world around us, Cities & Artists Mamia Bretesche Gallery Arles, aims to be a place for the promotion of contemporary art linked to a reasoned use of nature's resources, without any ideological coloration other than the spirit of openness to others and their cultures. Mamia Bretesché has been an art consultant and critic since 2001, promoting the work of established and emerging living artists, and stimulating interest in the collection through her research. In parallel, she develops innovative turnkey projects with institutions and the public, such as the copyright-protected "Plug'n Art" project and concept (Sell the work with the equipment that goes with it. NFT, video projection, digital based art). The gallery will be located at 13, rue Molière in the city of Arles in 2022. Previously, from 2003 to 2017, the gallery was located at rue Chapon, then rue Notre Dame de Nazareth in the Marais district of Paris. The gallery has participated in numerous international art fairs, enabling it to develop a network of collectors and discerning art lovers.