Lydia Ourahmane - Wax belly - Wax, Brass - 2019 - bust 83cm, waist 66cm, hip 91,5cm
Lydia Ourahmane
Born in Saϊda, Algeria, 1992
Lives and works between Saϊda (Algeria) and Barcelona (Spain)
Her research-driven practice explores major geopolitical issues of our time testing the permeability of boundaries and the state of being in-between. Her work in recent years has built on complex histories of colonialism, migration and abstraction in a poetic exploration of the present, the personal and the political.
Many of the projects by Lydia relate to her immediate surroundings and feature objects loaded with social, political and experiential meaning. She is interested in spirituality, contemporary geopolitics, migration and the complex histories of colonialism. Using video, sculpture, installation and sound, her work is expressed in a very distinctive language. Often in a large or even monumental format, it is invariably rooted in personal stories and experiences, whether individual or collective. Hers is a praxis that says: How can the institutional structures and parameters that define contemporary societies be defied? How can vigilance and the impositions of bureaucracy be rejected? How can the mechanisms of state control be deactivated? How can artworks involve active and effective protests? Ourahmane manages to bring the personal into the political field and the domestic into the field of history.