The artwork "Bed work / (The story didn’t stop at Jack’s hotel)" by Soufiane Ababri features a vivid palette dominated by earthy browns and reds, with a prominent figure lying on a bed set against a muted gray wall. Surrounding the figure are images and a hand reaching through bars, suggesting themes of confinement and introspection. Ababri's collage technique utilizes bold lines and flat colors reminiscent of Persian miniatures, exploring societal tensions and the duality of visibility and obscurity. The piece reflects Ababri's ongoing exploration of personal and sociocultural ambivalence. ...
It is in his bed, lying down, that Soufiane Ababri makes his "bed works". In essence, he examines the ambivalence of a society that is criss-crossed by tensions that are not so much the reflection of its contradictions, but rather of its complementarity. His heritage lies in his own story, built up by layer upon layer of personal and intimate events. A lover of sociology, Ababri’s entire body of work plays with the idea of seeing: the artist observes a world that observes him in a form of introspection combining his own unique perception, shared representations and accepted social facts in an exercise that is reminiscent of Persian miniatures and their subtle play with what is hidden and what is revealed. ...
T H E P I L L was founded in 2016 by Suela J. Cennet in the historic peninsula of Istanbul, to operate as a global platform and mobile vessel for contemporary art, supporting artists through a dynamic of cosmopolitanism beyond the dialectics of center and periphery. Initially envisioned by its founder as a space for an aesthetic of friendship, the gallery's programming is strongly inspired by the history and ideas of utopia and dystopia in modernism, with a particular focus on displacement, diaspora, feminisms, and queer aesthetics as reflected in contemporary artistic practices. ...
