Bedwork / Yes I AM

2021 - Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)
10 pieces, each: 32 x 24 cm

Soufiane Ababri’s desire to construct a historical family and a genealogy of queer kinships in Bedwork / Yes I AM sees him conjuring up a pantheon of gay writers and artists whose intellect has changed the course of human history and development, despite their outsider status. Figures as disparate as Michel Foucault, Glenn Ligon, Allen Ginsberg, Jean Genet, and André Gide populate Ababri’s drawing series in the artist’s signature naïf style, their homosexuality the thread that connects them. The series of over forty drawings are part of Bedwork, a larger project that Ababri began in 2015. The importance of Bedwork / Yes I AM lies in its simplicity. The simple lettering in these crayon and colored pencil portraits of gay writers reads, “I AM NOT JUST A FAGGOT. I AM A FAGGOT LIKE [NAME OF WRITER OR ARTIST]”. The seminal figures represented in this selection of ten drawings are: Reinaldo Arenas, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Derek Jarman, Guillaume Dustan, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Allen Ginsberg, Hamed Sinno, Rachid O., Langston Hughes, and Mark Morrisroe. With this blueprint, Ababri establishes an intergenerational line of continuity. The series demonstrates how the rapport between queer subjectivities, ancestry, transmission, and kinship can be expressed and experienced. Placing himself in this genealogy, Ababri’s project is acutely art-historical, as opposed to activistically motivated. The lineage he establishes traces a legacy that addresses and resists the gaps in dominant historical narratives.

Soufiane Ababri’s practice is, first and foremost, embodied by the artist’s queer subjectivity. Situated in various political contexts, his work acts as an instrument of dissidence in the face of authoritarian rule against non-normative bodies. Ababri’s drawing-based and performative works are concerned with subverting regimes of representation. Through poetic associations, these projects ask, with urgency, how artistic practice can provide an understanding of desire, play, sex, and gender outside of imposed binaries. Ababri’s is a practice that draws upon articulations of queer kinship and community; it accounts for contingency and mutuality. His work draws its contours in relation to the communities it aims to speak to, as well as the histories of violence and dispossession that lurk behind dominant histories. Ababri’s work is animated by a tender and intimate determination to unpack and toy with elements from popular culture that have been adopted and reclaimed by queer subjects. His works are vibrant, exhilarating, and full of candor. They probe questions that pertain to how cultural production shapes minoritarian subjectivities, and how acts of resistance against systemized forms of homophobia and racism can often be found in quotidian instances.

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