Art Taaalkssss: Sonia Kacem

Sonia Kacem describes her installations as “scenographic pictures in which the body is brought to wander.” She works with architecture and materials that refer to various discourses, practices and conventions of giving form to the female body. The artist often uses fabrics that stretch and shape the body and materials meant to control it, to dominate and regulate its movements. Her abstract installations create an environment of desire and fantasy that escapes the normalizing social forces which attempt, yet fail to ever fully contain the body. At times Kacem uses the architecture of the studio as an extension of the individual to play out scenarios of entanglement and disentanglement, guiding the visitors inside a spatial frame, “where aesthetics, dynamism and contemplation can be physically perceived.” The titles of her works turn them into characters that perform within her exhibitions, in an attempt to build a tension that can be found in domestic spaces, raising questions about sexual norms and behavior in society.

Born in Geneva, Sonia Kacem lives and works in Amsterdam. She studied at the HEAD in Geneva and at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. Recent solo exhibitions include Did snow fall on the pyramids?, T293, Rome; Carcasse, Centre Culturel Suisse, Paris; and Night Shift, Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva. Her exhibition Between the scenes is currently on view at Westfälischer Kunstverein in Münster and in Delirious, the 10th edition of Lustwarande in Tillburg.