In An Instant, The Magician Had Conjured A Dove From His Hat : Soufiane Ababri

The exhibition precedes Ababri’s first major UK solo show at the Barbican, London in 2024 and explores recovery and appropriation as tactics of defense and proliferation to sustain an emancipatory horizon despite hardening positions around fixed gender identities.

In a conversation with Ross Bleckner from 1995, artist Felix Gonzales Torres recounts “People would say, “Can I come to your studio?” And, I’d say, “Sure, but my studio is underneath my bed.” Activating this historical conversation around art and artistic practice in the most intimate setting, Soufiane Ababri invites the spectators to take part in a trans-historical imaginary exchange between himself, Felix Gonzales Torres and Ross Bleckner taking place in the bedroom. The space of the bed as a metaphor for the rejection of the studio has been a prominent feature in Soufiane Ababri’s practice for a long time, particularly embodied in his ongoing series of drawings titled Bedworks. Critically and humourously engaging with the intimacy of the bed in its associations with the body and the subconscious, Ababri’s works reveal the underlying vulnerability in expressions of masculinity. In his large drawings and collages, what’s hidden, stored or repressed underneath the bed is deployed through a colorful fantasmatic imagery intertwining fear and eroticism. The exclusively male figures in his drawings seem caught in moments of intimate, sexual, and emotional exposure and vulnerability, alternating between expressions of shame, desire, horror and joy.