Même si d’au fond ça s’dispute mama et papa ils s’aiment

(However much they argue, mummy and daddy love each other)

– JuL em “Dors petit dors”

It starts off as a lullaby, the song Dors petit dors by French rapper JuL. Widely played by young French people, the track narrates the experience of a child living in the suburbs and having grown up in an unstable family environment. Sara Sadik named her first solo exhibition in Portugal after it, at Kunsthalle Lissabon, where the world of dreams is turned into an immersive multimedia experience.

Sara Sadik’s artistic endeavours are built around performance and multimedia installations. In describing her work, the young French artist coined the term Beurcore[1], meaning the culture of young French people from the African diaspora, specifically from the Maghreb area (North Africa), comprising countries such as Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Mauritania and Libya. She brings allusions to urban culture, the Marseille football club, French rap, video games, anime and manga into contemporary art. These references are important and decisive in the lives of many young people living in suburban neighbourhoods of French cities, frequently victims of racism and religious intolerance. The clothes, the musical genre, the language and the symbols are all points of contact between several people at once. And Beurcore is about everything that unites them, which is created but also consumed by them.

As we descend the stairs to the Kunsthalle Lissabon exhibition hall, the bright yellow light gradually invades our field of vision, until we come up against the transparent plastic curtains, coloured in the same way, dividing us from the next ambience. We pass through them and are overwhelmed by the venue’s intense blue light, and this is where the dream kicks in.

A white inflatable with winding contours is unfolded throughout the room, on which we can take a seat. Four televisions lean towards us on the ceiling, displaying a multichannel video in which we see an androgynous shape with a cybernetic arm walking through a desert landscape. We have no idea where it’s going or what its objectives are. Neither do we know who is playing, but we realise how old it is (19) when it starts this virtual quest. Gradually, we find out fragments of its world and its memories.

The journey through this virtual desert is filled with encounters. The character finds items along the way that remind it of its childhood and adolescence. It encounters a toy car, a teddy bear, a console, a water pistol and a camping bag on its journey. Each encounter brings up a message describing the memories and sensations associated with that object. The teddy bear is related to the first time it was in hospital, having been the gift its father gave it on that occasion. As they are such specific memories, they force us to question whether they belong to the character or to the young person playing the game. The barrier between the real and the virtual is therefore diluted.

Sara Sadik’s work frequently uses the desert as an image. During a conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist, the artist addressed the notion of “affective desert”[2], explaining the absence of room for young men to express emotions such as sadness or love. By exploring this theme, the artist paves the way for a dialogue on patriarchy, reassuring young men that expressing vulnerability is also a sign of strength.

Stepping into a desert can be an experience of loss or an encounter. With Dors petit dors, it is the latter. An encounter with emotional memories and sensations buried in its dunes. A desert is an image also tied to the Maghreb area (marked by the great Sahara desert), and Sadik recognises it as a place that not only bears the geographical roots of the young people featured in her work, but also the sources of their emotional memories.

Dors petit dors is an immersive experience focusing on dreams as a way of finding our inner selves, drawing on and expanding the desert as a symbol. The refuge sought in video games, on the other hand, provides here a meeting place with important childhood memories, transforming an experience that usually leads to a disconnection with the real world into an encounter with the deepest part of ourselves.

Sara Sadik’s exhibition is at Kunsthalle Lissabon until September 2, 2023.

[1] Félix Boggio Éwanjé-Épée et Stella Magliani-Belkacem, « Une jeune scène française. Sara Sadik » — Numéro Art (2022). Page 179. Available in: https://galeriecrevecoeur.com/content/1-artists/sara-sadik/2-texts/ss_2022_numero_new.pdf

[2] In Conversation with Sara Sadik (2020). Available in: https://www.luma.org/en/live/watch/Conversation-avec-Sara-Sadik-5e6895a0-f502-4286-ac69-249ee27d398e.html