Flash Art uses cookies strictly necessary for the proper functioning of the website, for its legitimate interest to enhance your online experience and to enable or facilitate communication by electronic means. Yet after traversing the space, making oneself proverbially at home and succumbing to the tacit provocation to open drawers and survey the objects with increasing scrutiny, the sense of uncanniness creeps in.
To construct Barzakh , the artist physically shipped the entire contents of her apartment in Algiers to Basel, where she reassembled it from memory and rigged the installation with two systems of sound-based surveillance. Their site-specific actualizations unleash logistical absurdities and bear profound bodily and geopolitical consequences. Ourahmane attends to the affects and politics of displacement across space and time as she forcefully decontextualizes the objects that become her artworks.
In The Third Choir , she assumed the bureaucratic challenge of shipping twenty empty oil barrels from Algeria to Europe β the first artwork to legally exit the country since its independence in By divesting objects of their quotidian functions, Ourahmane animates them into exerting the durability and pressure of their colonial histories. The apartment that Ourahmane occupied upon returning to her homeland several years ago was built in , one of the first buildings that the French commissioned in their colonial renovation of the center of Algiers.
A century later, its exterior has witnessed the ongoing anti-government protests that have stunned Algeria since , whose revolutionary fervor has outlasted the reactionary banning of street marches in the pandemic present.
Within their divorce settlement, the woman kept the household objects of their postwar German life. Accompanying her return to post-Independence Algeria, these objects were left untouched after her death and furnished the apartment that Ourahmane rented.
