D.N.A: Divine&Amaranthine | Group Show

March 11, 2023 - May 6, 2023 | Bhar Lazrag

This exhibition “D.N.A: Divine&Amaranthine” explores the conscious and unconscious worlds, past and future, that drive the three artists through their various mediums and techniques.

ARTISTS:

Bachir Tayachi

The series “Sweet Melanin” is an ode to our first home as humans, to the skin that endures our worries and embraces our battles: skin whose smallest victories and divine beauty are rarely celebrated.

Bachir Tayachi, in his majestic and dreamy photography series, pays tribute to his muse “Mabrouka” – whose name also connotes blessing and luck – and celebrates the depth of her features in a waltz of color and light. The photographs reveal subtle grace that often escapes our eyes and highlight a universal delicacy that unites us all. Beyond flesh and through flesh, Bachir awakens our intangible identity and heritage.

Today, far from the reality some face, we disconnect, just dissatisfied in front of our screens and our standards of virtual aesthetics. The artist seeks to “suture” the void that separates us, to question the norms that blind us, and to reclaim human splendor in contemporary art scenes.

Sweet Melanin is also a light that resonates in the darkness of current political circumstances, which darken our days and spread hate and aggression toward skin deemed unworthy. In a world where discrimination targets a gaping wound, the exhibition evokes a wound through which light envelops you completely.

Issam Smiri

“Surface Narrative / Syncretism JdS.2” represents the logical culmination of his professional and artistic experiences, responding to certain limits and challenges he encountered in the publishing and design sector, such as the constraints of print media in Tunisia and the need for innovative design solutions that restore dialogue between graphic design, narratology, and craftsmanship.

This project aims to create synergies between sectors that can complement each other and forge new collaborations, opportunities, and paths forward, as well as reinvent the narrative function of artisanal objects. The artist seeks to involve female artisans in his practice to revive and highlight a cultural heritage specific to his region.

The starting point of Surface Narrative was the carpet as a narrative surface and storytelling medium; he thus reassigned its symbolic and narrative function. By merging the carpet with contemporary illustrations, Issam also expands the understanding of comics and introduces a new medium for comics that goes beyond the limits imposed by publishing, developing the role of the illustrator.

The concrete goal of this series is to create comic stories on carpets, exploring various issues through personal experiences and reflections on different aspects of the social and symbolic universe of family, community, and the artist’s native region.

Othman Taleb

The only permanence that is not an illusion is impermanence.
Impermanence is the appearance, passing, transformation, or disappearance of “things” that have begun to exist or have appeared. It means that these things never persist in the same way, but disappear and dissolve from one moment to the next, across times and spaces.

Impermanence confronts humans with the objectivity of time and space through the experience of duration. Perpetual change, impermanence, is necessary for something to exist, and it is precisely because everything changes that humans can change. There is always a beginning after an end. Everything becomes possible.

Could true wisdom then lie in the positive acceptance of this “existential fluidity”?

Impermanence can be subtle, revealing semi-hidden phenomena that do not appear to direct perception but can be apprehended through sensitive and emotional deduction.

This drawing series seeks to integrate this idea of timelessness and impermanence through a pictorially offbeat approach, giving a delightful touch of irony to the representation of pop culture icons and popular myths in art history, all housed within spaces where architecture and light are one.