SISSI Club performance with Samir Laghouati-Rashwan (guests Martha Kirszenbaum)

SISSI is a curatorial entity thought up by Elise Poitevin and Anne Vimeux, and created in April 2018 in Marseille. The SISSI Club gallery, dedicated to young creation, opens in 2019. Here, SISSI invites Marseille-based artist Samir Laghouati-Rashwan for a new performance entitled Dance Against, Samir Laghouati-Rashwan collaborates with artist Mystique to create a work fusing video installation and DJ set. In line with the artist's research into slowness, and his recent videos using the practice of found footage, Dance Against is inspired by dance videos posted on Tiktok, and focuses on the practice of slowed-up and speed-up. At the same time, Mystique's DJ set also appropriates the aesthetic codes of TikTok. The editing and mixing effects familiar to TikTok users are reinterpreted and reinvented in real time, creating a symbiosis between music and projected images. By transposing the virtual space into the scenic space, and introducing signage into the video, Samir Laghouati-Rashwan invites the audience to take possession of the performance space, and become its actors.

Samir Laghouati-Rashwan

Samir Laghouati-Rashwan, born in 1992 in Arles and currently based in Marseille, is a graduate of the École supérieure d'art & de design Marseille-Méditerranée. In his practice, Samir Laghouati-Rashwan takes up small, seemingly trivial, everyday, contemporary and above all apolitical objects. The work he develops around these objects, however, challenges their supposed banality; they become bearers of colonial histories and geopolitical complexes. His work has been shown at Triangle-Astérides and the Festival Parallèle, Marseille, at the Fondation Kadist in Paris and at the Chichas de la Pensée in Pantin.