“Nous étions mille sous la table”: Aïcha Snoussi reveals herself at the Palais de Tokyo

Following her independent exhibition “my loved ones” at the Fondation Zinsou museum in Ouidah where she presented a bouquet of installations around rubble, laterite, coal, drawings, bones, objects and lights in a knot of reverberations with a narrative path of 814 meters in the hedge of the Jardin d’Essai in Ouidah.

The contemporary artist Aisha Snoussi presents a sequel at the Palais de Tokyo, before continuing in Tunis in 2023. Winner of the Fondation Rambourg prize in 2020 for her project “underwater“, an archaeological fiction about a civilization rediscovered on the African coast, Aïcha Snoussi proposes the exhibition ” Nous étions mille sous la table ” for her most memorable new performance in a French organization, and sends her wandering practice, which finds its foundations in drawing, embracing sculpture, installation and sound creation.

Drawing from both the gustatory codes of science fiction and prehistoric studies, traversing the mundane hypercircles of the past and future, the exhibition “ Nous étions mille sous la table ” presents itself as a cave enlivened by past commemorations. A subterranean bar that comes out of nowhere from the green-tinted seabed that is omnipresent in his work.

At the heart of this place is a pool table in transformation, whose legs extend like roots in search of water. From the openings of the billiard table escape a heredity of anonymous submerged animals that are called, then, eccentrics. The outer layer of the billiard table is frothy and alive.

Posed against one of the walls of the bar, two billiard sticks turned, lattices of the godothèque of Aïcha Snoussi, weapons of the need and rules of the game.

On the walls of the cave, drawings, observers of a celestial body of shooting stars that have shaken the youth of the artist, later, his evenings spent at the Plug, gathering place of the alternative scene in Tunisia. This celestial body, similar to a tornado, swallows and disgorges unique references: the shadows of Vincent van Gogh, the themes of Frida Kahlo and Lee Bul. Through the expressions of Monique Wittig, Esteban Muñoz or Saleem Haddad and the dreams of rock engravings of Tassili n’Ajjer. For in his eye, live together the party and mourning.

The work of Aisha Snoussi questions the ideas of personality and the legitimacy of standards and arrangements through drawings and installations. By blurring the lines of reality to show remnants or clues of a set of experiences she has rethought, Aïcha Snoussi nurtures an individual folklore that alludes to episodes in our contemporary history (personality and movement orientation) while encountering a set of cozy references.

Her work questions the relationship of the attraction and the object to history, to memories, to ruins, to what remains, in natural and marvelous game plans in exchange with the places put in resources in situ.

This exhibition is declined in a progression between Montpellier, Ouidah, Paris and Tunis. The first installation ” sepulture aux noyé.es ” is an ancient personalized site composed of 801 bottles of drawings, works and natural elements immersed in water.