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 ! 

Revealing queer identity as a utopian horizon and the underlying vulnerability in expressions of masculinity, Soufiane Ababri’s works critically and humorously engage with historical works of art and texts - essays and literature - and unfold within a historical and contemporary discussion at the intersection of queer politics and postcolonialism.

The exclusively male figures in his drawings seem often caught in moments of intimate, social, sexual and emotional exposure and vulnerability, alternating between expressions of shame, desire, horror and joy. Depicting scenes in a simplified, almost naive manner, his drawings present a flattened perspective reminiscent of both orthodox imagery and Persian miniatures in their collapsing of distance and spatial hierarchy to re-arrange values associated to figure and background, between what is obviously visible and what may not be. Ababri’s use of text alongside drawing at times conveys an internal dialogue in confessional or humoristic form from the introspective space; while in larger collage works he paints over found materials to activate a deeper social and political backdrop.