Louisa Babari
Visual Artist
May - July 2024
- Visual Arts
- New York
“A tale of fiction and multimedia, Un risque de confusion is the chronicle of an encounter in Los Angeles and New York. Two cities in chiaroscuro that change the lives of the protagonists, marked by migration, revolutions, and conflicts.”
Born in Moscow, of Russian and Algerian descent, I am a French artist living in Paris. After an academic career devoted to Political Science, Russian language, and Cinema, I began making experimental films and writing feature-length fiction documentaries.
In the early 2000s, I began to practice collage, as an extension of my cinematographic practice. I photograph architecture as if capturing a portrait, focusing on the character of buildings and ruins and am thinking of exhibiting Soviet photographs of my Russian and Algerian family. Maintaining a continuous dialogue with cinema, I work with sound pieces, using text and voice as a means of re-reading critical productions. I feed these creations with a repertoire of cultural elements borrowed freely from ideologies, psychiatry, architectural revolutions, literature, and fiction. These points of reference enable me to present and privilege my own experience, to resist assignment.
My residency project will link my current artistic projects with a new multimedia production dedicated to the writing of a fictional narrative, the creation of a sound installation, a video, photographs, and drawings. Entitled Un risque de confusion my project recounts the encounter between Daria, a woman of Russian origin, and Karim, a man from Dagestan.
Louisa Babari (born in Moscow, lives in Paris) is an artist working at the intersection of visual and sound art, critical theory, and literature. Her practice explores the politics and poetics of sound, image, and discourse as forms of self-determination, in relation to political issues, affect, collective representations, forms of belonging and dissidence. In 2018, Louisa Babari was awarded the Roberto Cimetta Fund Fellowship with a program in Pan-African poetry. In 2021, she is the recipient of the Mondes Nouveaux research and production grant from the French Ministry of Culture. In 2023, she is the winner of the AWARE Prize for women artists.
My project takes the form of a field chronicle in New York. This chronicle contributes to the creation of a fictional narrative and a multimedia device. Un risque de confusion tells the story of Daria, a woman of Russian origin, and Karim, a man employed by a Russian company in Los Angeles.
As the custodian of the first-person narrative, I evoke, in dialogue with Karim, the New York of the ’80s and ’90s. The exchange invites two journeys, two experiences marked by the fall of the USSR and migration, which in turn reveal other chronicles. The evocation of two American megacities punctuates a narrative set in the 2020s and the memories of the protagonists.
The title Un risque de confusion alludes to the confusion of being in a megalopolis at the crossroads of one’s own history, identity, and territory. The confusion experienced by the characters reflects their ability to integrate into new worlds, to disconnect from the old, and to adopt new ways of thinking. Un risque de confusion narrates individual experiences, encounters, and events, as well as social, professional and romantic relationships.
My stay in New York gives me the opportunity to meet people from migratory communities in Europe, the Middle East, Asia, domestic migration (Michigan, Arizona) and South America (Ecuador, Mexico).
The project addresses the following questions: how do we belong to a culture? How do we live with the memory of conflict? How are we affected by social violence? How do we deploy our strategies of resistance to domination?
Un risque de confusion is a text-score that allows us to think of literary creation as a series of repetitions, a continuous sequence of multimedia “works or stories”, each one inspired by the previous one while developing its own originality.
The idea for my project was born in Los Angeles. The main characters, Daria and Karim, meet there. Karim has been living there for several years. Daria is passing through, reconnecting with a city she knew in 1990. Un risque de confusion is a contemporary urban chronicle that inspires a screenplay based on my own experience, meeting people who have emigrated to New York or Los Angeles. For some, New York is the first stage in their migration. Los Angeles is the continuation or end of a journey, a culmination, a definitive installation.
What emerges are a Los Angeles and a New York that seem to exist between worlds, suspended in time and space. My project invests two cities in chiaroscuro, two spaces that come together, merge and drift apart. Two cities – “between-worlds,” to use Edward Saïd’s term. Two spaces on the move, places with no return. The themes of displacement and filiation play an antagonistic and complex role in my practice.
The city of New York meets my narrative expectations, so great is its capacity to identify America and to blur the obvious. The ambiguity that operates with the distance and proximity between New York and Los Angeles, disseminates personal chronicles. The protagonists’ movements through the neighborhoods of Downtown, Brighton Beach, Brooklyn or Queens, Silverlake, West Hollywood or Los Feliz, foreshadow an idealized urban space, conducive to the coming of danger, natural disaster or the end of a relationship.
In this sense, Un risque de confusion addresses questions that Americans are asking themselves, against a backdrop of pandemic and nuclear threats, social and political violence, and economic crisis.
In partnership with
A.I.R. Gallery
La galerie A.I.R. (Artists in Residence, Inc) est une galerie coopérative féministe, à but non lucratif, gérée par des artistes et destinée aux femmes et aux artistes non binaires. Fondée en 1972 par un groupe de vingt femmes artistes, A.I.R. offre un espace alternatif où des artistes qui se trouvent en marge du monde de l’art contemporain et du canon de l’histoire de l’art peuvent prendre des risques.
AWARE
AWARE: Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions est une association loi 1901 à but non lucratif co-fondée en 2014 par Camille Morineau, conservatrice du patrimoine et historienne de l’art spécialiste des artistes femmes. Devant la sous représentation féminine dans le monde de l’art, AWARE a pour ambition de rééquilibrer la présence des artistes femmes et de leur donner une meilleure visibilité, par la diffusion de ressources en libre accès. Ainsi, son site web bilingue français /anglais propose plus de 900 notices biographiques d’artistes femmes des XIXe et XXe siècles ainsi que des articles et entretiens élaborés par des chercheur·euse·s et commissaires du monde entier.