Please Adjust Your Dress Before Leaving: Soufiane Ababri

THE PILL is pleased to present Please Adjust Your Dress Before Leaving, Soufiane Ababri's third solo exhibition with the gallery from September 5 to 26 in Paris. Join us for the opening from 5 pm to 8 pm ! 

It’s full of men. Hair, balls, hard and tired cocks, shapely buttocks, neatly trimmed moustaches. Briefs filled with desire. Red, Black, browned and beiged men. Like a recurring note, these cheeks flushed pink with pleasure appear again and again, revealing a certain fleshiness. The distinguishing mark of a community of b.r.aises. Arms hold on to a lover, one mouth takes in a swollen head, another releases a cloud. Desire bursts everywhere, like their short-sleeved shirts straining under the pressure of their biceps.

Please Adjust Your Dress Before Leaving: Soufiane Ababri borrowed the phrase from Victor Hugo, from page 182 of Les Misérables, to make it the title of his exhibition. Originally, it was inscribed in public toilets for men in Victorian England. It was a reminder, an invitation to dress oneself “properly” before returning to society. In Les Misérables, it is used differently, to criticise those privileged enough to ostentatiously display their victories and other feats of arms. Here, it becomes an injunction turned against itself.

In the exhibition: two folding screens stand upright, creating spaces in which an “adjustment” – of the gaze – becomes possible. Their concealed sides display scenes of male tenderness on a scale rarely seen in Soufiane Ababri’s work. Beyond their function in dividing the space and allowing viewers to shift their position in relation to the works, these screens also refer to Jean Genet’s The Screens (Les Paravents, 1961). The “public” sides of Soufiane’s screens feature floating gloves, some stuffed with what appears to be straw: a direct reference to a scene in the play. When it was first performed at the Théâtre de l’Odéon in 1966, its critique of the French army’s actions in Algeria was fiercely condemned. 

In Rave Under Pont de Clichy (2026) – which might equally be read as “Rêve” (Dream) Under Pont de Clichy – Soufiane Ababri anchors a collective scene, a parody of a pastoral fête, in the very place where Algerians peacefully demonstrating for Algerian independence were massacred by Maurice Papon’s police. It was the night of 17 October 1961, the same year Genet wrote The Screens. The drawing brings pornographic scenes crashing up against the arrest of Algerians, a demonstration of veiled women in high heels, a fire-breather, a juggler, and a father protecting his child. All of this unfolds against a backdrop of grass, overlapping rugs and watermelons. For this drawing, Soufiane assembled a set of images from a variety of sources: a fetishising and essentialising pornographic website (Cité Beur), archival images (for the arrest), and photojournalism (for the photograph of Jamal al-Durrah protecting his son behind a barrel in Palestine). In the foreground, a painter, facing the scene, is preparing to depict what is unfolding before him. But is he even capable of doing so? Or is he doomed to reproduce orientalist images of what he does not know? This is the question raised by another work, A Quiet Moment of Opposition to Our Elders, at the Park (2026), in which the two protagonists, lying down – the position Soufiane himself adopts when drawing – are engaged in study. Naked, they put into perspective Pier Paolo Pasolini’s writings on Eritrea, which, for all his radicalism, also cast a colonial gaze upon black bodies. This does not, however, amount to condemning him, as the work’s title makes clear.

Just as folding screens can unfold and alter the configuration of a space, Soufiane Ababri’s drawings offer continual rearrangements – historical and genealogical ones, in particular.

With Nicolas Abdallah Moufarrege, after Peter Hujar (2026), he draws a figure far too little known in the history of art of the second half of the twentieth century – because too too gay, too Arab, too ill – and places him back upon a kilim, a traditional Persian and Turkish rug, giving him back a sense of belonging that had been denied to him. In Self-Portrait as an Artist (2026), it is Soufiane who, this time, takes up the camera. A cruising scene unfolds before him in a public toilet whose walls are covered with references to a decentered gay culture [see Rodney Evans’s Brother to Brother (2004)], yet his camera is pointed at the water flooding the setting instead. The artist himself merges into this setting through the way the tiled pattern slips onto his shirt: he abolishes the very distance inherent in all representation. Just as he abolishes the distance between the support of his works and his body when he draws.

Cédric Fauq

Soufiane Ababri (1985, Rabat) lives and works between Tangiers and Paris. He has had solo exhibitions worldwide including Their Mouths Were Full of Bumblebees But It Was Me Who Was Pollinated, The Curve - Barbican Centre, London (2024), In An Instant The Magician Had Conjured A Dove From His Hat, THE PILL, Istanbul (2023); NON MERCI!!!, Dittrich & Schlechtriem (Berlin, 2022); Bunch of Queequeg, Praz-Delavallade, (Los Angeles, 2021); YES! AÏ AÏ AÏ AÏ AÏ AÏ AÏ ... AM, Mendes Wood DM, (Brussels, 2021); A Circus Act Behind Bars of Lilac And Blood, Kulte Art Center (Rabat, 2020); Tropical Concrete Gym Park, Glassbox (Paris, 2020) and Memories Of A Solitary Cruise, THE PILL® (Istanbul, 2019). His work has been shown in institutional group shows such as The Artist is Naked, Kunstpalais Erlangen (Erlangen, 2025);  Who’s Afraid Of Stardust? Kunsthaus Nürnberg (Nurenberg, 2023); Every Moment Counts, Henie Onstad Kunstsenter (Oslo, 2022); Queering The Narrative, Neuer Aachener Kunstverein (Aachen, 2022); Trilogie des cendres, FRAC Pays de la Loire (Carquefou, 2022); Habibi, les révolutions de l’amour, Institut du Monde Arabe (Paris, 2022); Attention, International Festival For Contemporary Art (Glasgow, 2021); Welcome Home Vol.II, MACAAL (Marrakesh, 2020); Lignes de vies - Une exposition de légendes, MAC VAL (Vitry, 2019) and Par amour du jeu, Magasins Généraux (Pantin, 2018), among many. His work is part of private and public collections of FRAC Poitou-Charentes, FRAC Pays de la Loire; MACVAL; Museum of African Contemporary Art Al Maaden in Morocco and X Museum in Beijing.