Soufiane Ababri

Their mouths were full of bumblebees

★★☆☆☆

Curated by Raúl Muñoz de la Vega
On until 30 June 2024

The Barbican’s architecture is an awkward setting for an exhibition. Ababri’s installation shows that part of the estate could easily be turned into an upscale gay cruise club. The space is lit dimly, plush red, and hidden by a suggestive chain link curtain hanging. Behind it, a series of homoerotic paintings marks the Curve’s walls like gloryholes at a truck stop. There is no maze and no foam party, either, but the show’s half-finished scenography and a one-off scheduled performance make an alluring promise.

One leaves this club unfulfilled. Ababri’s paintings of and for the Grindr generation are more cartoonish than they are from life. The men who occupy his frames engage in acts of narcissistic hedonism explained by phrases such as ‘bareback’ or ‘high and horny’ that litter the forms. These are the norms of Western sexual liberation that conquered this Moroccan artist’s world, too.

The gallery text suggests that Abarbi wants to resist Eurocentric queer theory, presumably to make room for some more true, local, or even Islam-friendly gay liberation. His paintings, however, do nothing of the sort. They barely offer a description of his subject’s condition that would root them in anything other than the international gay party circuit. These works are thus incapable of insight or critique and only serve as cheap titillation for the Western audiences, the sort of which the artist and his lovers hopelessly want to experience too.


notes and notices are short and curt exhibition reviews. Read more:

Talar Aghabshian, Solace of the Afterimage at Marfa’ at The Approach ★★☆☆☆

Talar Aghbashian

Solace of the Afterimage

★★☆☆☆

The carpet dealer gallerist’s zeal reveals the work’s lamentable inadequacy. 

Adriano Costa, ax-d. us. t at Emalin ★★★☆☆

Adriano Costa

ax-d. us. t

★★★☆☆

Form triumphs over detritus.

Joshua Leon, The Missing O and E at Chisenhale Gallery ★☆☆☆☆

Joshua Leon

The Missing O and E

★☆☆☆☆

This embarrassing display indicts today’s second-fiddlers with narcissism and egomania.

Your Ghosts Are Mine at Palazzo Franchetti ★★★☆☆

Your Ghosts Are Mine: Expanded Cinemas, Amplified Voices

★★★☆☆

This attempt at building pan-Arabic film aesthetics falls prey to the art technician’s trickery.

Tommy Camerno, Delirious at Filet ★★☆☆☆

Tommy Camerno

Delirious

★★☆☆☆

What’s left of the show are stage props that feed adolescent imaginations with false memories of the long-finished party.

Gina Fischli, Love Love Love at Soft Opening ★★★★☆

Gina Fischli

Love Love Love

★★★★☆

What good it is to be best in show when the competition is lame, crooked, or outright fake?

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