Caméléon Club by Tarek Lakhrissi

solo exhibition from February to March, 2019
at La Galerie, Noisy-le-Sec (FR)
 

Following his six months residency at La Galerie, poet and artist Tarek Lakhrissi presents his first solo exhibition Caméléon club, a fictional and performative ensemble. Taking narrative speculation as a starting point, he calls for a future of emancipation and interactions between physical bodies and bodies of knowledge. The setting of the art center is transformed into an allegorical spacecraft, to call upon queer poetics and minority references, in which artworks and participants sketch the outlines of a future utopia.

 



Lakhrissi’s practice addresses language and its performative dimension: what it does and does not allow. His poetic writings revolve around code-switching, using repetitions, rhymes, and iterative forays into English, Arabic, and French. Always negotiating spaces between achievement and failure, these ventures into translation and transition aim to put pressure on language by way of a subjective and marginal experience, altered by ever-shifting voices. The roots of Tarek Lakhrissi’s poetry stems from his political attachments and identities: as a queer Arabic poet, he explores languages that might be cultivated, inherited, assimilated, familiar, foreign, or vulnerable; and by repeating them, as in a learning process, he also exhausts them. His narratives establish a space where the liberatory power of speech can roam freely, inviting slang, popular culture, and theoretical references to join the party.

 

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photos credits: Pierre Antoine