Soufiane Ababri

If I had to put a title here it would be my epitaph

June 13th to July 26th
Opening on July 13th from 6 to 9 pm

The private and public blur and bend in the work of Soufiane Ababri. His works are intimate disclosures where their creation in the artist’s bed and the immediacy of his mark making maintains a brutal and sensual energy long after completion. There’s a power to the personal that touches the viewer collectively, in their making and their depictions. We might not all use our place of sleep as a place of work, but the contours of these spaces where we spend at least a third of our lives are felt and known. What goes on in the bed, shown with the belief that these are plein air drawings, bridges the individual and routine: datebooks, series screened on laptops, books, food, self, sex and the artistic tools of their own making. Like nesting dolls of reflections, the specifics of these items and actions open up to the viewer as they recognize them and approach a certain closeness to the artist. We are defined with what we culturally consume, the ways we act, and align ourselves into subgroups actively and inherited accordingly. In many ways each piece is forwardly or subversively a self portrait, and like all good portraiture they reflect as much as they illuminate. The bed is a politicized space even if it has no business being one. The private is always overseen by the public, who care who the bed is shared with, who enact a society in which it might be the only space one has to occupy. In Ababri’s dense mirrors we realize that the personal is larger than the self, and that any specific titling would be both a memorial for love and living as much as an end itself.

Mitchell Anderson

One day you die. One day I die. One day we all die. Death can creep up stealthily from behind, unannounced, unbidden, unwanted. It forces itself in, wreaks havoc, then departs – satisfied. Death can also be beckoned, lured and invited in. Meticulously planned. Everything just so. A script fine tuned until the final curtain falls. It can be brutal, sweet, terrifying, sublime, unfair… It hardly ever repeats itself in the same manner, cannot be second-guessed. It rarely ever comes when you actually want it to or need it the most. Nice try. I’ve often wondered in what form death might strike, frozen by fear or capitulating to its demands, my wishes, less so on what is left behind. What will there be to remember? And, maybe more importantly, for who? When love dies, do you die with it?

It’s funny how in French disparition is sometimes used to announce a person’s death. Iel a disparu. They have disappeared. Disappearance implies leaving no trace. Poof! Vanished, a magician’s trick, one day here, next day – gone? If Soufiane Ababri thinks about death more than what may be considered a healthy amount, it is because it is everywhere. Just look around. And should it arrive tomorrow, what do you leave behind? For his first exhibition in Switzerland, Soufiane Ababri undertakes a deep excavation of his own past and present to ask just that, but also, and maybe more importantly, to consider the possibility of maintaining agency when one is no longer here.

The drawings and works on paper that Ababri has chosen to present at flatmarkus are a select culmination of nearly ten years of artistic practice, made in bed – although not always the artist’s own – a site of production that purposefully points a finger at itself as a willful marker of class division and hierarchy. Together, the still lives, vanitas and portraits that make up this coterie of Bedworks speak of heartbreak, morbidity, rage, of those lost to sickness, terror, of unrequited love, of the death that comes when one turns a blind eye. Not so dissimilar to an epitaph, they reflect on their place in the world. Among the newer pieces, one stands out for its distinct watermelon + black backdrop and painted wooden frame that repeats this same configuration of colours that we all recognise and yet are taught not to pronounce. Keep your mouth shut. Against this flag, this call for liberation, a denunciation of horrors still being committed in our name, two guys are sharing beers. Or is it piss? The sanguine red around one eye equal parts bar brawl or something altogether more ominous.

Shit. Is there nothing left to say? We’re in Switzerland, after all. But isn’t so-called neutrality just another word for cowardice?

Jean Genet. Sarah Kane. Chris Kraus. Tom Burr. Susan Sontag. Douglas Crimp. Yukio Mishima. A chosen family, still living and dead, but more than anything a family of names whose sharp tongues, minds, sex, politics make uneasy partners for a society desirous of heroes less… complicated, complex, more vanilla. One’s legacy is a 4:48 suicide, unbeknownst to the masses. Another’s anti-colonial struggles scrubbed clean. A hand sorts Skittles into colour-coded piles on a watermelon-coloured bedsheet. But this is no pick’n’mix. Next to one of the most beautifully erotic paeans to desire ever filmed lies another written tale, two sides of the same coin – imprisonment. With them the artist’s daily calendar notes, anxious not to forget. Have a dose of paranoia after alcohol, but not after sex. Among the small tributes that are habitually posed on top of Susan Sontag’s grave in the Cimetière du Montparnasse rests a hand, holding a red bouquet of flowers. Ready to be brutalised, this cut-out drawing – and with it Ababri himself – is not content to be contained within the safety of these walls.

Art isn’t here to make you sleep well at night. If anything, you should be bleeding.

Anya Harrison