Sara Sadik
Sara Sadik was born in 1994 in Bordeaux, she lives and works in Marseille.
Sara Sadik’s work is rooted in what she terms beurcore, the culture of French people of Maghrebi descent in all its complexity. She analyzes its specificities and translates them into visual and material concepts. Through semiological and sociological analyses of beurness, Sara Sadik develops various alter egos that she embodies in short videos using compositing techniques, combining chromakey and 3D modulation. She integrates these videos into sculptural installations. She reappropriates collective adhesion processes—visual aesthetics, economic systems, and multiple languages—established and/or used by the beur community to construct fictional situations drawn from reality, whether set in the present or a speculative future. By repurposing and shifting these references, Sara Sadik seeks to create a composite vision that distinguishes itself from media generalizations and proposes potential future evolutions.
In 2016, she created the character Melissa Lacoste, a Marseille-based R&B singer. Her lyrics are an autotuned anthem to the city of Marseille. In December 2016, she released her first album, Gadji en Or, and has since performed under this pseudonym during the Gadji en Or European Tour in clubs, festivals, and exhibition openings in Paris, Berlin, Geneva, Brussels, and Rotterdam. Sara Sadik earned her DNSEP (Master’s in Fine Arts) with honors from the École des Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux in 2018. Since 2015, her work has been featured in group exhibitions, including at Karma International (Zürich, 2017), Occidental Temporary (Paris, 2015), Art Athina Fair (Athens, 2017), Roodkapje (Rotterdam, 2018), Open’er Festival (Gdynia, 2017), and 221A (Vancouver, 2017). She has also performed live-streamed events from the Swiss Institute (Rome, 2015) and Triangle France (Marseille, 2016), as well as at music festivals such as Europool (Berlin, 2017) and Transeuropa Fluid (Hildesheim, 2018).
In June 2018, she presented her first solo exhibition at Galerie Silicone (Bordeaux) and was preparing two more exhibitions at Continuum (Bordeaux) and the MoMA (Warsaw) for fall 2018.
