Al Madina

Solo exhibition at A. Gorgi gallery 2016

Madinat Al Amwat Digital photography A.Gorgi Gallery, 2016

"Al Madina or The Visual Odes to Our Dead Souls" Text by Mohamed-Ali Berhouma about Al Madina:

It is the sprawling city, The fiery octopus and the ossuary And the solemn carcass. And the paths here stretch infinitely Towards it.

Emile Verhaeren, The City.
(...) the old walls rise, like white shrouds. Emile Verhaeren, The Sprawling Cities.

The city has always carried or supported the grand dreams of high civilizing missions. Utopias have demonstrated this by building ideal cities as models for societies where humanity and happiness could be claimed. But these urban dreams remain mere utopias, non-places. Far from this, our urban universe is very real. And we often forget it, we don't think about it. The city, its high walls and buildings loom over us. The city, its endless extensions and sprawling ramifications surpasses us. We are engulfed within it. Our posture does not easily allow us to think about the city that envelops us. It seems rather that it is the city that thinks about us. This too is forgotten: the city is a built incorporation, an agglomeration of the orders and imperatives of a political, social, economic, ideological... in short, systems of control, domination, conditioning.

Fortunately, a few rare beings escape the blindness imposed by increasingly oppressive partitions. They inhabit the city and their free consciousness, their lucid intuitions, open up other paths beyond the routes and outlines imposed by the city. They see and evoke other imaginaries than those administered by advertisements and signs well-established in the corridors of our daily lives. These beings manage to subtly evade the city's orders that shape, surveil, and constrain us, precisely because they see. Intissar Belaid is one of these beings. She sees and, more importantly, reveals her visions with a subtle force to let a truth emerge that is no longer perceived: the real.

I was fortunate to witness, in the artist's notebook, the emergence of the works. A precise and accurate intuition follows their genesis. Meticulously, each vision seeks the paths that will crystallize it as accurately as possible. And finely, these visions find their way without yielding to the material weight where art often falters. The work of embroidery, audiovisual and photographic images, and collages was conducted with an attentive eye and hand to capture, throughout the work, the fluttering, the suspension through which the work presented itself to the artist in a delicate yet powerful apparition.

Flipping through her notes and drawings, following the thread of her ongoing creations, an inner voice seemed to emanate from beneath her works:

Embroidering a pain, an anxiety, a wound. Tracing with a persistent thread these memories of a needle piercing unwaveringly through the fragility of marked flesh, mutilated by the burns of a perverse cigarette. This is my body, my carcass, and I offer it to you as fodder.

Tracing a light that blinds me with its terrible and sublime poetry. And from the depths of urban graves, turning eyes to the skies and seeking that glimmer which will resurrect the gaze with every blink. To live, to see to testify. To speak, to shout what drags us down so low. To exorcise the visions that haunt my urban dreams, cutting, gluing, shaping the enchantments of the imagination. To throw into the faces of empty and voraciously blind gazes their scavenging reflections of the pleasures of dead flesh, dead from seeing their souls dissipate in the ethers of fluorescent neon.

To create finally, like an animal struggling until its last breath. To create.

Everything is constellated around a central image. An inscription, a graffiti on a wall. "The City of the Dead." This cry crashing against the wall traces an initial crack. The high ramparts of the city are weakened, shaken. Like a trembling and decomposed image revealing the various layers beneath it, a vision of the city, in all its metaphorical power, appears to the artist. Through these cracks, through these gaps, the city reveals itself and what lies within becomes transparent. The walls no longer protect: they hide, confine, imprison, entomb. It is this reality that Intissar Belaid's works show, open, liberate, and exhume in a series of visual poems as so many funerary orations dedicated to our dead souls wandering in the city with walled horizons, in the world, finally, in the forgotten skies.

(Text: Mohamed-Ali BERHOUMA)

Al Baqara - Embroidery on Transparent fabric, 120x60cm, A.Gorgi Gallery, 2016

Al Madina triptych, Digital photography, A.Gorgi Gallery, 2016