Galleries in Paris » 193 Gallery

SZYMANKIEWICZ – 193

Galleries — Thu, 27 Jan 2022 13:24:56 +0000

Born in 1980 in Poland, Małgorzata Szymankiewicz is a painter and visual artist. With her latest paintings, Szymankiewicz explores unreconciled existential problems in her abstraction, juxtaposing feelings of frustration and satisfaction. Her compositions consist of folding, adding, layering, multiplying. Although they convey a sense of closure and nostalgia for a coherent and intact whole, they can also be seen as a new definition of form.

HABIB – 193 GALLERY

Galleries — Wed, 15 Dec 2021 14:38:54 +0000

« Inspiration is a force; others are the source of the artist in me. I find myself particularly drawn to musicians like Sun Ra, Jimi Hendrix and jazz legends like Miles Davis, Louis Armstrong, John Coltrane and Nina Simone Music in general is an integral part of my life and work. I believe that art is founded on the idea that sharing the creativity of others arouses in you the greatest forms of creativity that it inspires to look at what constitutes its environment and its community and that this sharing initiates creative visions, nourishing self-hope and inspiring others.

My work questions the role we play in this world as humans but also as our own identity, called black, white, yellow, Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu or whatever we choose to believe. I believe you don’t have to be of color to play a sparkling role in this world. Your actions, whether good or bad, will be the imprint you leave on others for them to contemplate and / or follow. It is important to remember that you are human first and foremost. (…) My painting does not concern any theory or any -ism. There is no other content than the image and what it shows. There is no need for political messages. The lines themselves are visual proof of the energy and process we go through as people of color. « - Idris Habib

ALIA ALI – 193 GALLERY

Galleries — Fri, 22 Oct 2021 09:47:16 +0000

Mot(if), an exhibition by Alia Ali

curated by Mary-Lou Ngwe-Secke

The fabric, a timeless icon of identification, reveals itself through its histories to be a carrier of illusions and takes a major place at the heart of the practice of Alia Ali, Yemeni-Bosnian-US multimedia artist. The wax fabric blurs the traces of her colonial and capitalist history by throwing a colorful filter on it, with rich and sometimes deceptively identifiable patterns. Under the artist’s hands, it becomes polymorphic, questioning the way things are named, translated, reinterpreted, but also the initial reason for their production. Their origin is indeed very different from their contemporary names, which can mislead one`s perception of their actual place of production. Her photographic sculptures and installations use complex textiles from, ikat and batik to Mylar. Alia Ali highlights the lexical richness perceptible in the creation of these motifs. She conceptualizes this hyper-optical collaboration between yarn, dye and our senses, while noting the unrewarding cultural appropriation of which they are the object.

Reorientations are also studied, challenging the viewer to consider linguistic uses. Indeed, contemporary recuperations and cultural expectations, still too often erroneous, are defused under the multiple-entry prism of the word Hub/Love. Photography, textile and writing unite to orient the viewer towards complex notions of inclusion, exclusion, erasure and politicization of body and language. Hence, the artist questions the viewer’s gaze and the unconscious projections that accompany it, while breaking the boundaries of language, which has become a motif and a source of refraction for the most resolute consciences.

The artist then endeavors to deconstruct the economic, political, societal or even colonial ramparts, set up by small groups fantasizing the majority. Thus, through a hypnotizing optical game, Alia also explores the unknown importance of the color indigo as a factor of physical, cosmic and historical union transcending conflicts, borders but also cultures and religions. Throughout Mot(if), Alia Ali wishes to highlight the theme of inclusion and exclusion through silhouettes covered with fabrics from 11 regions of the world, and questions the visitor on his own position “Is he the included or the excluded?”

Always in a logic of multiple angles of vision, the second entrance of the 193 Gallery dedicates an installation to the rupture of the dystopian present of migrating beings. The artist declares the different layers that composed their lives; proposes a temporal reinvention of their reality; and finally invites them to reorient their future towards a radical imaginary axis leaving behind a future as fantasized as erroneous and leading only to the loss of their history.

Finally, the descent towards a radical futurism takes the visitor towards the questioning of what wants to be a protective entity, but which by a succession of proofs reveals itself to be a source of destruction for the reason that the conflict is more profitable than peace.