23.11 - 17.12.10

with

Leila
Sadel

This solo show of Leila Sadel takes place following the artist’s residency at Le Cube – independent art room.

“The reading and the journey, the timeframe and the assemblage, the speech and posture give me the feeling that the work of Leila Sadel is an iteration of gestures, gaze, and words. Although they do not collide during their emergence, they slide among each other, and snoop around like some elementary particles that she catches with a butterfly net to transform them into senses and images.

Pinned to the walls, moments are in dialogue with one another: everyday things, fortuitous encounters, words adjusting our perceptions, what I understand, and what watches us.

At the cutting edge of Sei Shonagon’s words, like Koto’s notes that chime out, respond the images similar to a dereliction of Rabat’s streets, with the unsteady walk of the character in Entre temps and the melancholic voice of Abdel Halim Hafez singing j’étais ailleurs.

One can easily imagine oneself being both the hunter and the butterfly, both narrative intent sensor and / or adequate element in the pursuit of history that disseminates in front of our eyes. With quiet footsteps, the silence serves as a grid to drama, because it is question of an intimate tenuous relation, one that is sensitive and ready to break.

We are on the thread taut by Leila Sadel, as all that she does is on the background of silence, as all she shows is a rustle, wings flapping, where the number and the enumeration take the place of breathing. We perceive the sound of scissors, coming from a backroom, that cut out tirelessly between the lines, the known and the unknown words of this Arabic language that she re-mastered by these meticulous gesture.

Leila Sadel sends us back to both our disruptive and prolific presence, all at once. The flight of the butterfly, jerky, stealthy, unpredictable, colorful, authorizes his hunter to subtle acts for a hazardous capture, but one which must be delicate in order to preserve all the nuances.
Leila Sadel suggests a promenade where Tout ce que l’on fait est sur fond de silence (All that We Do is on the Background of Silence).”

Franz Kreysler

About the exhibition
• Text of Leila Sadel
• Leaflet of the exhibition
• Plan of the exhibition

Press
• “Beside Memories” in Afrique in visu
• “Nos vies ont, toutes en communs, un fond de silence” in Le Soir