All the information about \'Mirage\'Zoulikha Bouabdellah\'s show for the art gallery Sabrina Amrani. Included national and international press cliping

1. Press Kit
Mirage show by Zoulikha Bouabdellah

2. About Mirage.
Bouabdellah explains the motivations that prompted her to develop
Mirage: "In a few months, history has changed its side. It is now being
written in the south, across the Mediterranean, where after Tunisian and
Egyptian revolutions, civil war in Libya and the rising of Syrian people, the
spreading revolution has arrived to Bahrain and Yemen. And, while Moroc-
co launches unprecedented political reforms, Algeria is committed to
strengthening the democratic process. ¿How will all this end up? No one
can say with certainty", says the artist. Her only certainty at the moment is
that, as in every revolutionary process, images will perdure converted into
icons. Bouabdellah found her own: "a picture of a Mirage aircraft of the
Gaddafi’s Air Force". Shot down in flight by rebel forces, the image
showed the aircraft with its beak pointing towards the Libyan soil. "The hit
didn’t come to be seen but it is significant and significative: the dictator is
no longer invincibile", concludes the artist.
“Is your love
darling just a mirage?”. 2011

3. This image, chosen for the Mirage (I, II, III, IV and V) series and for the
triptyc “Is your love darling just a mirage?”, "brings us back to the ideals of
the revolution". With these pieces, Bouabellah lays down some questions:
"Will they inspire the continuation of the story, or agitated as broken promi-
ses, will they remain in the state of mirages, as a more or less distorted
picture of what was a real ideal? ". In between what is here (the revolution)
and what will arrive (the democracy), the artist has found in the military
aircraft Mirage a perfect image.
In the exhibition designed for Sabrina Amrani, the idea takes the form of a
geometric composition inspired by the Arabic artistic repertoire. As the
concepts that underlines the tradition of the tiles, the Mirage artworks teach
the unattainable in an experience that exceeds the contemplation and push
to interpretations. "Just as the passage of this plane is difficult to discern,
due to the physical phenomenon of refraction searched purposely by the
builders of the aircraft, the shapes of Mirage combines a series of rhythmic
movements that the eye can not see accurately. These are shapes that
attract actors and spectators of the history with this lack of certainty that
characterizes each revolutionary episode", says Bouabdellah.
The installation Algol is a schematic representation of the constellation of
the Perseids. The name Algol comes from the Arabic "Ras al-Ghul", literally
the head of the devil. The ancient Greeks saw in this star the eye of
Medusa, a creature with the head covered by snakes whose gaze turned
to stone anyone who dared challenge it. Composed of flashing and
lighted beacons, Algol is a mythological reading of tyranny, a work in
progress aimed to design the map of dead stars, of fallen dictators by the
wave of change in the Arab world.
The exhibition is completed with Slogan, a deviation

4. of the original meaning of the phrase sung by Umm Kulthum, the Egyptian
grand dame of the Arabic song. This cry of a woman, chained for the love
and eager to regain her freedom, here becomes a revolutionary slogan, a
universal formula for all the oppressed.
“Slogan”. 2009

5. Mirage artwork.
“Mirage I”. 2011

6. “Is your love darling just a mirage?” 2011
.

7. “Mirage II”. 2011

8. “Mirage IV”. 2011

9. “Mirage V”. 2011

10. Too Many Mirages I. 2011 Too Many Mirages II. 2011
Too Many Mirages III. 2011 Too Many Mirages IV. 2011
Too Many Mirages V. 201 Too Many Mirages VI. 2011

11. Too Many Mirages VII. 2011 Too Many Mirages VIII. 2011
Too Many Mirages IX. 2011

12. ‘Mirage’ in press.
Babelia. El País. 10th June 2011

13. Babelia. El País. 11th June 2011

14. The International Herald Tribune. 17th June 2011

15. Metrópoli. El Mundo. 17th June 2011

16. About Zoulikha
Bouabdellah.
Zoulikha Bouabdellah is French and Algerian although was not born in
France nor in Algeria, but in Moscow, where his parents studied. Her
personal history and her work, developped in the tension between groups
and different cultures that were juxtaposed, crossed and confronted in
time: the family emigrated to France from Algeria when Zoulikha was 16
years old, in the early 90's. At that time, Algeria lived the civil war years.
But before that confrontation, the young Zoulikha already lived the contra-
dictions each day, returning from school. The world of covered women in
which she lived at school became a gallery of sensual Orientalist pictures
and classical sculpture depicting naked women: this collection consisted
of funds that the Museum of Fine Arts of Algiers hidden to the public and
that the artist, the daughter of the center's director, could see every day
before entering his home, located in the very museum.
The contrast and impossible synthesis between a puritan and repressive
outside world, where iconic representations are prohibited and this other,
in which Zoulikha discovered a sexual and aesthetic freedom in art forms,
is one of the key elements expression of the artist, along with his relent-
less pursuit of freedom that transcends religious barriers, political, moral
or formal. Zoulikha Bouabdellah constantly explores the interstices
between "them and us" between the North and South, Europe and Africa,
Christianity and Islam and fundamentally, the gap between men and
women, the gap between what is visible and what is not said, the split
between pleasure and pain.
The artist often focuses on Arab and Islamic contributions in astrology,
mathematics, religion and aesthetics with a disturbing ability to forge new
meanings to expressions and recurring motifs which repeat, relate, over-
lap and reveal new and very modern meanings that intuit the interaction
of cultures. So she did with the series Two lovers, in which the word love,
so often recorded in the Arabic art, becomes two lovers that test all Kama-

17. sutra postures.
Another of her most recognized work is Walk on the sky – Pisces, which
won the ArtDubai Abraaj Capital in 2009, the highest prestigious award in
the Arab world. In this ambitious work, a three-dimensional design, Zoulikha
“Two Lovers”. 2010

18. embodied the constellation Pisces from conception of the astronomer
Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi (903-986), whose representations from Ptolemy
studies are the basis of present knowledge in this field. The piece made
use of the polygonal star, one of the symbols most depicted in Arabic art
and architecture throughout the ages, and closed the space with a floor
of mirror: the same that the Queen of Sheba crossed for her encounter
“Walk on the sky -Pisces”. 2009

19. with the King Solomon, that wanted to satisfy his curiosity, not believing
the rumor that her ankles were hairy. This reference, present in the Bible
and the Koran, attached to the contribution to human knowledge of
al-Sufi, reflects the dialogue between cultures present in the work of the
artist.
With these works, the artist ensures is not searching subversion, although
she recognizes that "the transgression is an essential component of
modernity, that allows us to depart from the beaten path and change the
codes to look beyond". However, Bouabdellah’s work seems to look for
the subtlety in the message and a positive view of the underlying conflict.

20. Selected artwork.
“Love - Red to blue”. 2009
“Love - Yellow to blue”. 2009

21. “Le Rouge et noir”. 2008

22. “Silence bleu”. 2009

23. About the gallery
Sabrina Amrani.
The promoter of this new space for contemporary art in Madrid is Sabrina
Amrani. French of Algerian origin, she impulses a gallery project marked
by one word: dialogue, to see and to listen to others. Therefore, the
distinctive signs of the gallery Sabrina Amrani are proposals that invite to
think on the individual, the society or space. "Political or social thoughts:
the artist's own, always individually", Amrani said.
The gallery collaborates with artists José Luis Bongore, Elvire Bonduelle or
Zoulikha Bouabdellah, among others. Established and emerging artists of
many nationalities will come together in her space because, as stated by
the gallerist: "Nor art, much less dialogue, have borders." However, Amrani
acknowledges that the project will pay particular attention to the new
voices that are emerging in the Middle East and North Africa region.

24. For more information
00 34 627 539 884
mariajose@sabrinaamrani.com
Madera 23. 28004 Madrid, Spain
www.sabrinaamrani.com | twitter.com/sabrinaamrani | facebook.com/sabrinaamraniartgallery