Rhizome

Adel Bentounsi — Fares Yessad  — 

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Rhizome is a newly established contemporary art gallery based in Algiers. Operating as both a commercial gallery and an independent art organization, rhizome works on promoting emerging contemporary artists, with a focus on art from Algeria and its diaspora.

Through collaborating with artists, we work closely in accordance with individual approaches and practices, in order to support the realization of extraordinary projects.

Rhizome will be presenting artists Adel Bentounsi and Fares Yessad.

The exhibition includes Yessad’s new series based on “Les Fables” of Slimane Azem with dominant and metaphorical animal figures drawn from the poet’s tales. Known as the poet of exile, revolt and insubordination, Slimane Azem has been censored for more than 25 years on the airwaves of the Algerian radio for his positions and claims, within a timeframe that crosses the colonial and post-colonial periods. He remains to the present day a strong symbol of resistance in Algerian popular culture.

In duality, Yessad proposes a floating and solemn work with a contemporary and contextual reinterpretation of Azem’s fables, in a form that is both lyrical and political.

On the other hand, Bentounsi's work unfolds patterns of accidents and coincidences that shape societies, using a loop of "jostling" and "harvesting" referring to the causality and fortuity of some events and their substantial affect in the course of individual and collective lives.

The combination of the works of the two artists culminates into a dizzying mise en abyme between the existential, the intrinsic and extrinsic struggle, merged with political and social concerns.



82 rue Didouche Mourad, Alger, AL
+213 (0)23 50 40 98

︎ gallery@rhizome.agency
︎ rhizome.gallery
︎ www.facebook.com/RhizomeAgency

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Adel Bentounsi