My practice was born from an obsession with pink, a fascination with celebrities, long nails, excessive jewellery: everything that Western aesthetic norms have long classified as vulgar, excessive, worthless. Through painting, installation, performance and writing, I attempt to restore the dignity and complexity of these heritages, articulating them with the digital visual cultures in which the diaspora reinvents them today.
What nourishes my work is the conviction that situated cultural heritages can produce a hybrid culture at the crossroads of a new reality. My dissertation From Arab Divas to Cultural Diasporic Baddies traces the genealogy of these hyperfem Maghrebi practices, long folklorised by the colonial gaze but always resistant, and their reinvention by diasporic youth. It is this same resistance that runs through my canvases, my narratives and my performances.
Through the canvases I present, I play with imagery from different eras but always rooted in internet culture. I play with memory and romanticisation: in the same way that imagery from the 2000s is being reinvoked by today’s youth, I create a collage that appears dated in its visual codes yet could never have existed at the time, as it is nourished by a contemporary imagination that romanticises that era. It is also a way of echoing the diasporic experience, which can tend to exoticise its own heritage through an experience that can never be faithful to that of someone who grew up in their country of origin.
The hanging is also central to this work. Obsessed with the way certain people visit exhibitions specifically to photograph themselves with the works, I wanted to create a space designed to be Instagrammable, including within the paintings themselves, which contain a mirror in which the wallpaper is reflected so that one can take a photo against a leopard-print backdrop.
Finally, the choice of the leopard print motif was motivated by its symbolic dimension and history. This motif carries a decolonial, protestatory and anti-classist discourse. It resonates with my interest in hyperfem practices that are valued differently depending on the body performing them: femininity perceived as vulgar on a racialised body, then reclaimed as trendy when taken up by a white body.