At the Biennale de Lyon, which this year takes place under the sign of fragility, an artist has its place: Sara Sadik, 28 years old. In a video installation deployed on five screens in the former Fagor factories, visible until December 31, young men of North African origin work to invent a planet to become “the heroes of their own existence”. In a previous film by the French artist, this same elite corps called “Ultimate Vatos” was presented as “men excluded from the body of the nation”, systematically placed in a situation of test – and inevitably of failure. Borrowing from the aesthetics of video games as well as the codes of reality TV, Sara Sadik has been deconstructing for six years the cliché of the “young man from the suburbs”, this stereotype that is spit out by conservative editorialists and the algorithms of search engines.
“For the first time, I saw works to which I could connect, people whose origins I shared. »
Algerian mother, Moroccan father, having herself grown up on the outskirts of Bordeaux, fed up with rap and video games, nothing predisposed her to become an artist. It will take the chance of an applied arts option in a high school in the city center to propel her to the Beaux-Arts of the Gironde city. She discovers the work of her elders, Mohamed Bourouissa, Neïl Beloufa and Meriem Bennani, who play with the identities and symbols of the Maghreb diaspora. This is the revelation: “For the first time, I saw works to which I could connect, people whose origins I shared. »
“Invisibilized”
It is in the course of young people from working-class neighborhoods that the artist draws the material for his videos. Difficult for this generation, although born in France, to invent a future in the shadow of the concrete, in a society which tends to stiffen and where equality is not acquired. How do they react to the hardships that punctuate their daily lives to find a job or accommodation? How are they built in love? Women are, strangely, absent from his films, except for Sara Sadik herself, in the role of a narrator with smooth hair, jet-black eyes, an impassive tone. “The men I work with are invisible, or misrepresented, she says. There is an urgent need for men like my little brother to exist in the field of contemporary art. »
Her own rise was rapid: invitation in 2019 to the Do Disturb festival, at the Palais de Tokyo, residency in 2021 at the Luma Foundation, in Arles, collective exhibition at the studio des Acacias, in Paris… In June, a “ solo show » organized by the Galerie Crèvecœur, at the Art Basel fair, propelled her onto the international market. “Everything is going quite well”, slips the big anxious, little inclined to brag. Her dance card for 2023 is however already full, with three exhibitions planned in Rome, Lisbon and in an art place in France whose name she prefers to keep silent. The subject ? A fiction in a shisha bar whose users come across fantastic creatures, ” a little Arthur and the Invisibles and The world of Narnia », reveals Sara Sadik, who now enjoys dreaming of a feature film.
