Oumlil is the first monograph of the artist EL Meya comprising a series of works she developed between 2015 and 2017. It is also the title of her solo exhibition which opens on 20 March 2021 at the gallery rhizome in Algiers and will be on view until 10 April.

The book includes over twenty paintings and sketches and has been deliberately designed and produced in a style and format to mimic a ” travelling exhibition”. The handmade, limited edition book also includes essays by five authors, including Anissa Bouayed: “About El Meya and Oumlil: the Ogresse is her! “Guillemette Grobon: “El Meya, painter of the face to face”, Hajar Bali: “El Meya, painting, and the elusive energy”, Karima Lazali: “An eroticism of boredom” and Bernadette Dufrene-Nadia Saou: “Moving forward! A woman in painting”.

Born in 1988 in Constantine, Algeria, EL Meya lives and works in Algiers. A graduate of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts d’Alger in 2013, the artist questions the representations of her Algerian, Maghrebian and Mediterranean society, the position of painting with regard to the history of art. El Meya‘s painting, in its naive form, is by no means innocent. It deals with the body, the flesh and wounds.

About EL Meya and Oumlil: the Ogresse is her! Extracts from the text by Anissa Bouayed

Oumlil, Oum Lil. This project has a name, a name that can be composed as if one were weaving a web, polysemic through its intermingling of Arab references to the mother and the night, and Berber references to the Mediterranean Sea. It is like an invitation to think broadly, to embrace a long history, with reciprocal influences between civilisations.

(…) The Oumlil project is at the junction of an anthropological approach to rites, myths and the sacred and aesthetic reflections on the representation of symbols, on the limits of the representation of sexuality, the body, violence and death, which gives it this enormous transgressive impact. There is something performative in this risk-taking. The challenge is there, in the transgression. “There is no such thing as an innocent eye,” said the art historian Ernst Gombrich.

(…) The first impression is one of visual disruption. Even if the room for manoeuvre is narrow, EL Meya has avoided falling into provocation with its risks of being pointless, counterproductive and repulsive. Her strategy is to astonish, even to disturb; which makes us stop and take the time to understand what painting means, for her and for us. She stretches her canvases between reality and us, to fight against the “obvious”, against appearances, against things that are “self-evident”, that “pop out”… She asks us to walk from canvas to canvas, in front of which we would “freeze-frame”, as if in front of so many screens, in order to disturb us at first, so that we can then ask ourselves questions, once this first feeling of disquieting strangeness has passed.

(…) Thus the Oumlil project connects the portraits of women but also of men to the question of power; she captures in the family – that lowest common denominator of the social structure – which she examines at different moments, these truculent and disturbing couples to say the question of the distribution of authority in the marriage, in the house with “gendered” spaces such as the living room or the street… She reveals the impact of the domestic division of labour which applies to these notions of interior and exterior spaces as the preserve of one or the other sex.

(…) These works are challenging because they require us to actively read them, to look for what is underneath as well as what we see on them, or imagine next to them, in that immaterial off-field that is nevertheless necessary and present to our minds.

(…) Oumlil offers us a revolving reading, allowing us to navigate a real regime of the imaginary, which is much more than an accumulation of one-dimensional and unquestioned archetypes. And this is undoubtedly the lesson that can be drawn from this representation of a world that is strongly impregnated with morality but that is not presented as a definitively closed system. EL Meya also shows that personal identity coexists with established identities, that there can be spaces of non-conformity… and that the power of imagination makes it possible to play with borders, to make them move.

EL Meya‘s work has been presented in numerous exhibitions in Algeria and abroad. The artist completed an artist residency in 2021 at La VillaArson, Nice, France/ and in 2018 La Friche Belle de Mai, Marseille, France and Résidence Méditerranée, L’Institut Français, Algeria. EL Meya is represented by the gallery rhizome, Algiers.

Oumlil

Exhibition of the artist EL Meya and publication of the monograph of the same name

rhizome –> https://rhizome.gallery

Algiers, Algeria

On view until 10 April

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Violence is an abuse. A relationship of domination. It is pernicious and imprisons its victims in silence. The after-effects do not only manifest themselves in physical assault. They spread and are suffered in the unsaid. Untold is an exhibition by Sonia Merabet and Abdo Shanan. A symbolic approach to the violence suffered and still suffered by thousands of women in Algeria and elsewhere. Crossed illustrations, of processes of psychological dis-configuration, or of hauntings evoked by the perception of a shadow, the very perception of oneself.

« Séquelles Bleues », a photographic series by Sonia Merabet

Sonia Merabet, was born in 1988 in Algeria where she still lives and works. Graduated in fashion design in London, photography has always been a working tool for her research and styling projects. After taking internships with fashion designers in London and New York in the months following her graduation, she returned to Algiers where she continued her practice as a stylist and photographer. In “séquelles bleues” Sonia Merabet places herself as a metronome in front of her model. She beats a measure in four beats: reiteration, movement, inertia to end with a moment of total sluggishness.

It is a combination of light and shadow to reveal conflicting and sometimes contradictory emotions simultaneously experienced in an internal struggle. It is in gravity that she fuses fear and liberation in a form of deaf poetry.

« Mémoire » a work by Abdo Shanan

This work cannot be qualified as exposable, even if it is presented . The memory is not showable. Memory is lived and often remains buried forever. Memory is evoked, reported, but not seen. So how can we present what has not been observed, or even what has been concealed?

Abdo retains his images in a closed and dark space and refrains from making prints of them, even getting rid of the materiality of the paper, so that they can be diffused in the form of rays or spectres. Abdo’s photos follow one another in recurring and irregular flashes. These are the flashes he experienced through his immersion in the details of the Wassila Network’s White Book, and the story of each victim whose story is told.

Abdo Shanan was born in 1982 in Oran, Algeria, to a Sudanese father and an Algerian mother. He studied telecommunications engineering at the University of Sirte in Libya until 2006. In 2012, he completed an internship at Magnum Photos Paris. Then, in 2015, he co-founded collective 220, a collective of Algerian photographers. Abdo Shanan adopts a methodology of documentary photography, with research, investigation and fieldwork, but he refrains from using the same tools and makes the photographic act, a committed act and a medium of analysis, more than that of detection, by taking an unpaved road, far from formalities and conventional aesthetics.

Untold

Sonia Merabet / Abdo Shanan

From 06 February to 08 March 2021

Gallery rhizome

82, rue Didouche Mourad, Algiers

contact@rhizome.agency

www.rhizome.gallery

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