Lydia Ourahmane: Lydia Ourahmane: Tassili
SculptureCenter, Queens, NY
2022
Production | Exhibition Grant
Lydia Ourahmane’s work often initiates large, open-ended propositions that obliquely register the longings and limitations incited by colonial occupation, civil war, and the paradoxes of belief. For her first institutional solo exhibition in New York, Ourahmane and a group of collaborators will produce a new moving image work that draws from a ten-day journey on foot in Tassili n’Ajjer, a largely inaccessible plateau spanning the border between southern Algeria and Libya. An arid and inhospitable expanse of desert and wind-lashed sandstone rock formations, Tassili N’Ajjer is host to thousands of prehistoric engravings and cave paintings that describe the transformation of life in the region over thousands of years, reflecting the increasing domestication of animals in service of human progress, changing scenes of conflict and ritual, and a drastically altered ecological landscape. Ourahmane’s project offers an urgent and expansive model for revisiting sites of deep memory and recognizing a latent sense of spirituality that is simultaneously repressed and heightened in contemporary life.
SculptureCenter supports artistic innovation and independent thought highlighting sculpture’s specific potential to change the way we engage with the world. Positioning artists’ work in larger cultural, historical, and aesthetic contexts, SculptureCenter discerns and interprets emerging ideas. Founded by artists in 1928, SculptureCenter provides an international forum that connects artists and audiences by presenting exhibitions, commissioning new work, and generating scholarship. Since relocating in 2001 to a Long Island City, Queens trolley repair shop converted into exhibition spaces by Maya Lin, SculptureCenter has presented works by over 900 artists through its annual exhibition program, and today, it is considered one of New York’s most important Kunsthallen.
