Leila Alaoui
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` #8503, Dashanzi 798 Art Factory, 2 Jiuxianqiao Road, Chaoyang Dst. 100015 Beijing, China | +86.10.59789505 [email protected] | www.galleriacontinua.com LEILA ALAOUI YA RAYAH Opening: March 23rd, 2019 Galleria Continua is proud to present for the sensitive body of work that she herself first time in China an exhibition of the work defined as primarily social. of Franco-Moroccan artist Leila Alaoui. The title of the exhibition has been borrowed The exhibition opens with the series Les from the Algerian song by Dahmane El Harrachi, Marocains, in very large format, on the same Ya Rayah: ‘O, you who are leaving’. This song of scale as the exhibition space. This long- exile was written in the 1970s and remains distance project, inspired by Robert Frank’s popular to this day. Its words are steeped in Americans, saw Leila Alaoui travelling through homesickness and the sufferings of exile, Morocco with a mobile studio, weaving while its melody distils an unspeakable together a multifaceted portrait of a melancholy. country through its inhabitants. Arabs and Berbers, women and men, adults and children Whether in No Pasara, her first work as a can be found side by side in a mosaic of professional photographer, for which she traditions, cultures, and aesthetics. As many worked with Moroccan youths yearning for a customs were gradually disappearing in the nearby yet distant Europe, or in her face of unbridled globalisation, these unfinished project with the immigrant workers portraits constitute something like the of the old Renault factory in Boulogne- outlines of a visual archive. But more than a Billancourt—L’Île du Diable—, or in her simple documentary, Les Marocains was also a encounters with Syrian refugees in Lebanon way for the young photographer to seek out for Natreen or Sub-Saharan African migrants her own heritage, to bring together the for Crossings, Leila Alaoui was consistently distance implied in the whole apparatus of aiming her lens at exiles, those who have been camera with a form of intimacy that drew on abandoned, left to disappear behind clichés her Moroccan roots and that was forged and statistics. In so doing, she brought into through the encounters she made with the focus the faces and the return gazes of men people on her journey. An irrevocable way to and women and children, with all that these make a claim for an autonomous aesthetic, told of the loss of home, of waiting, of freed of all Orientalist folklore and focusing regrets in the face of harsh reality, and of on the dignitity of individuals and of a hope despite everything. Alaoui’s encounters country. with these people are humbly revealed in a No Pasara, Alaoui’s first photographic nicknamed ‘the Devil’s island’ by the workers. project, acts as a sort of manifesto for her The factory, which today has been completely social engagement. This series shows the many demolished, was one of the biggest in the faces of a Moroccan youth looking for a country, a veritable pin-up of French passage to Europe, candidates to an industry that over its years in operation, uncertain exile, uprooted in the heart of from the 1930s until 1992, employed a large their own country. Remarkably humble as a number of foreign workers, especially from portraitist, Alaoui knew how to observe them, Africa and Asia. After her first projects, in to listen to them, only taking up her camera which she sought out people wishing to after long periods of shared time and migrate in order to tell the story of their exchange. She wished to grasp as best she attempts at departure, their hopes, and the could something of the lives, the dreams and obstacles lying in their way, Alaoui now turned mirages of those called Harragas (‘those who her gaze to those who had arrived. Uprooted burn’), along with the necessity they all felt workers labouring in difficult conditions, they for leaving their birthplace. were actors in the great social struggles of the 1960s to defend their rights and their Crossings, with its portraits of Sub-Saharan dignity. This unfinished project of Alaoui’s African migrants, is also the expression of aimed at letting them tell their story, letting encounters. This series, which began as a them recount the social memory of immigrant video work before becoming photographic, workers. The video presented here shows approaches these women and men who have their faces, either in portraits or as left everything behind in their quest for a witnesses returning to the site of the old better life on the other side of the factory. The video was to be the first part Mediterranean, with all the dangers of a of a larger project, in which the younger journey in which others have lost their lives, generations of immigrant workers were to and attempts to let them speak. Those who have been invited to speak also, contributing made it as far as Morocco, washing up almost to a global perspective. at the door to Europe, bear the visible or invisible scars of their unfinished voyage. In Leila Alaoui, Franco-Moroccan artist, the intensity of their gaze and of their photographer, and video maker, was born in 1982. stories, one discovers a continuity both with She studied photography at City University in the No Pasara photographs and those of the New York. Her work explores the construction of Syrian refugees fleeing war and chaos in identity, cultural diversity, and migration in the another series, Natreen, which Alaoui made in Mediterranean. She used photography and video Libya in 2013. Men, women, and children in a art to express social realities through a visual foreign country, dispossessed of their land language situated somewhere between and their property, hoping for a better documentary and visual art. future but stuck in an apparently interminable holding pattern. Morocco, Syria, Her work has been exhibited internationally Central Africa: other places, other reasons since 2009, including in Paris at L’Institut du to flee. Everywhere, the same uprooting, the Monde Arabe and La Maison Européenne de la same hope, illusions crashing against the same Photographie, in Sweden at Malmö Konsthall, and reality. Leila Alaoui determinedly fixed her at the Cascais Citadel Palace in Portugal. Leila sights on this reality, making herself into an Alaoui’s humanitarian engagement includes echo chamber for these distant voices, even photographic commissions from NGOs including while she was able to delicately, humbly the Danish Refugee Council, Search for Common retranscribe the beauty of these people Ground, and the Human Rights Commission. already become something more than the anonymous figures of the news. In January 2016, while working on a commission from Amnesty International about women’s The project L’Île du Diable, which is presented rights in Burkina Faso, Leila Alaoui fell victim to here in video format, is a work that Alaoui the terrorist attacks in Ouagadougou. She died began near Paris in Boulogne-Billancourt, from her wounds on 18 January 2016. The Leila where she had sought out the one-time Alaoui Foundation was created to preserve her immigrant workers of the Renault factory work, defend her values, and inspire and support that used to be situated on Seguin Island— humanist artistic engagement. .