Fayçal Baghriche

Souvenir

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Fayçal Baghriche, Souvenir, 2012, Steel, plexiglass, motor and wood, 75 x 48 cm diameter. Art Jameel Collection. Photo courtesy of the artist and Galerie Jérôme Poggi, Paris.

Artwork Details

Artist

Fayçal Baghriche

Title

Souvenir

Date

2012

Medium

Steel, plexiglass, motor and wood

Dimensions

75 x 48 cm diameter

Credit Line

Art Jameel Collection

Work Description

Souvenir is a luminous terrestrial globe, which turns so fast that it is impossible to distinguish continents and, within these, the geographical spaces of each country. The deliberate blurring of specific elements disrupts our perception of familiar images, in this case national boundaries and natural characteristics. Without the demarcations that separate land mass from oceans, the whole of the earth’s surface passes us by as a blur. Tilted on its axis, the globe is set on a wooden base with a meridian band, it has a childlike, didactic quality, something you would find in a classroom, and yet it is unreadable. 

Fayçal Baghriche is an assiduous disrupter of the implicit, habitual signs that form part of our everyday visual vocabulary. By playing with symbols, humour and our universal systems of identification, behavioural models or language structures that determine what we are, he stages something surprising, which become pretexts for his poetic constructions. The points of reference are familiar, exploring his relationship with objects we find around us that are easily identifiable.  He either modifies existing objects to make them correspond to his ideas or shifts the way they can be understood. Souvenir evokes a sense of innocence and simplicity—it is a familiar object, that we use to study our planet Earth but in the way he shows it to us at speed, it both makes it impossible to use and also provides us with an alternative perspective.

Artist Biography

Fayçal Baghriche (b.1972, Skikda, Algeria) lives and works in Paris, France

Mixing performance, installation, sculpture, video and photography, Fayçal Baghriche undermines familiar points of reference with his unique approach to the everyday and our collective societal consciousness. Baghriche studied at Villa Arson in Nice before moving to Paris, where he helped to create an artist’s residency at La Villa du Lavoir in 2003. His work has been shown at numerous exhibitions in France and internationally, including Le Shed, Centre d’Art de Normandie, France (2017); Human Resources, Los Angeles (2014); the Delfina Foundation, London (2012) and Kunstverein Bielefeld, Bielefeld, Germany (2010). His work has also been included in major international exhibitions such as the Dakar Biennale (2014); Gwangju Biennale (2012); and Triennale of Sorocoba, Brazil (2014). Souvenir was exhibited during the 54th Venice Biennale in the first pan-Arab pavilion, The Future of a Promise (2011). 

www.faycalbaghriche.com

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