ARABOFUTURS Science-fiction and new imaginaries

Contemporary art exhibition

23 April 2024 to 27 October 2024

In the context of the turmoil the world has been facing over the past half-century, science fiction is the preferred medium for questioning current societies and exploring the fault lines of our immediate future. In the 2000s, artists from the Arab world and its diasporas embraced speculative fiction to imagine the worlds of tomorrow, and to make a blunt assessment of how societies are evolving. With their minds on the future, they question and transgress the present.

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ARABOFUTURS invites visitors to enter the dreamlike worlds of science fiction and the new Arab imaginaries. This contemporary art exhibition serves as an introduction to a fantastic, dynamic laboratory of hypotheses currently unfolding across all creative domains.

Here, videographers, visual artists, photographers, and performers renew perspectives, redefine identities, and aim to offer emancipating counter-narratives. Globalization, modernity, ecology, migration, gender, and decolonization are among their key subjects. Eighteen artists present new, plural, committed, and life-affirming possibilities, or dystopian visions that reveal the contradictions of our world.

Their works function as both tools for reflection and invitations to shift one’s gaze towards alternative futures. They create a space where those who are often invisible in our present can see themselves and imagine a future in which they are legitimate. In this way, artists craft new emancipatory futures that challenge and liberate our imaginations from dominant, anthropocentric discourses. These works offer space not only to marginalized individuals but also to the living and even the non-living around us. The goal is to create a world where these elements can reclaim their place, highlighting the fragility of human dominance.

These "Voyage(s) to Tomorrow," as titled by Tawfik al-Hakim's 1957 play, provide both food for thought and contemplation. They invite us to envision futures with and through the Arab world, for humanity and the living world as a whole.

The exhibition features works by Zahrah Al Ghamdi, Sophia Al Maria, Fatima Al Qadiri, Mounir Ayache, Meriem Bennani, Hicham Berrada, Neïla Czermak Ichti, Souraya Haddad Credoz, Ayham Jabr, Tarek Lakhrissi, Søren Lind, Sara Sadik, Gaby Sahhar, Larissa Sansour, Hala Schoukair, Skyseeef, Aïcha Snoussi, and Ayman Zedani.

Curators : Élodie Bouffard - Nawel Dehina

Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind, video capture from In the Future They Ate From the Finest Porcelain, 2015. Larissa Sansour

Skyseeef, photograph from the series Culture is the Waves of the Future, 2022. Skyseeef

Hicham Berrada, Hygre nº2, 2023, 3D printed PLA, resin, automotive paint, and varnish. Photo Matthias Kolb / Courtesy the artist and Mennour, Paris © ADAGP, Paris, 2024

Neïla Czermak Ichti, Je suis seule et toujours seule (unless ?), 2021, oil on cotton canvas. Courtesy de l’artiste et de la galerie Anne Barrault, Paris