Waiting for Omar Gatlato
Collective show with Mohamed Aksouh, Arezki-Aoun, Kader Attia, Louisa Babari, Baya, Fayçal Baghriche, Abdallah Benanteur, Mahjoub Ben Bella, Adel Bentounsi, Halida Boughriet, Nasser Bouzid, Fatima Chafaa, Hakima El Djoudi, Hassen Ferhani, Abdelkader Guermaz, Mohammed Khadda, Mourad Krinah, Nawel Louerrad, Amina Menia, Ahmed Abdelaali Merzagui, Lydia Ourahmane, Sadek Rahim, Sara Sadik, Zineb Sedira, Massinissa Selmani, Fella Tamzali Tahari, Djamel Tatah, Hellal Zoubir and Sofiane Zouggar.
Curated by Natasha Marie Llorens
February 12 - May 16, 2021
3rd and 4th floors, Tour-Panorama Friche la Belle de Mai
In partnership with the Centre national des arts plastiques as part of the Cnap curatorial research grant, and with Box24. Co-produced with the Friche la Belle de Mai and supported by the Institut Français d’Algérie.
Waiting for Omar Gatlato presents twenty-nine artists from Algeria and its diaspora. This unprecedented perspective on the Algerian artistic context includes art works from 1965 to the present day, including several new commissions. It is inspired by Merzack Allouache’s classic film, Omar Gatlato, known as the first Algerian film to center on an individual experience of emancipation and self-discovery. Like the film that inspired it, Waiting for Omar Gatlato exhibits work that, at the scale of everyday experience, is saturated with surreal humor, meticulous attention to the body, and ambivalent sense of belonging.
Waiting for Omar Gatlato is also the title of a 1979 book published by Algerian lawyer, writer and feminist Wassyla Tamzali, devoted to early Algerian experimental film. Through her association of references to Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot with Allouache Omar Gatlato, Tamzali provides a dual sensibility and an important conceptual way forward. These two portraits of anti-heroes trying to make sense of their day to day lives illuminate the manner in which artists and filmmakers engage decoloniality, or the critique of European colonial regimes of knowledge.
Like Beckett and Allouache the works by the twenty-nine artists in the exhibition offer diverse, polyphonic, unstable representations of life in Algeria and in its diaspora. Rigorously critical in their relation to colonialism’s formal legacies, such as Orientalism and the monument, the works represent several generations’ reflection on their society that remains an important model for how art continues to think through decolonization.
Algeria’s eight-year struggle for independence from France (1954 -1962) and the euphoria of its achievement inspired the anti-racist struggles and independence movements of the 1960s and 1970s (most notably the African National Congress’ fight against apartheid and the Black Panthers, etc.) Yet over the last fifty years this political legacy has hardened into a single-party system founded on the war’s mythologization. Algeria’s artists reject this national mythology in favor of the everyday experience both in their work and, for some, since February 2019 with their bodies in the street. This exhibition testifies their multivalent commitment to emancipation in all the forms in which it finds expression.
To read the exhibition’s visitor guide, click here.
To read the exhibition’s press release, click here.
The Centre national des arts plastiques (Cnap) is one of the principal administrators of the French Ministry of Culture’s policies within the realm of contemporary visual arts. It continually enriches the National Contemporary Art Collection, which it conserves and also promotes via loans and consignments to both French and foreign institutions. Comprising nearly 105,000 works acquired from living artists over the past two centuries, this extensive collection illustrates the variety of artistic movements and styles. An essential cultural entity, the Cnap encourages the arts in all their diversity, accompanying both artists and art-world professionals via various support services. Furthermore, it showcases its supported projects through different dissemination actions and events, notably publications, conferences and exhibitions.
Box24 is an experimental arts organization founded by Walid Aïdoud in 2008 in Algiers that supports experimentation and international collaboration, in part through long-term involvement with ARTIfariti, an annual art festival held in Western Sahara in solidarity with the struggle of the Saharawi people. Triangle - Astérides partnered with Box24 to widen the scope of the exhibition beyond established artists working in Algeria.
