Yassine Balbzioui (1972, FR/MA) is a painter and  a performer whose practice operates at the intersection of fact and fantasy. His depictions of human animality often rely on masks and veer toward mockery, idiocy and the grotesque. In his paintings, Balbizioui also uses hands, glasses, flowers, hoods, rainbows and, patterns, etc. to hide faces. He mishandles his characters by putting them in absurd situations and turning them into “ghosts”. This can be interpreted as a further act of hiding as well as a declaration of freedom in which individuals can transcend their corporeality in order to experiment with new ways of being. His productions blend together music, sounds, voices, body works, costumes and accessories to create scenes from another universe or time.

Yassine Balbzioui, Ghostline, 2020
Wool carpets ‘Ait Ouaouzguite’
In collaboration with the women from Douar Taznakht (High Atlas, Marocco)
Commissioned by Manifesta 13 Marseille
Supported by Pébéo
Courtesy of the artist

Ghostline presents a series of seven handmade wool carpets, featuring scenes inspired by the artist’s stay in Marseille. Each of the carpets functions as an independent piece and as well as a part of a complex architecture. These works are an imaginative response to experiences of Marseille, translating the city’s everyday visuals into wild performances. They take the form of cinematic cut-outs, with visible and invisible links between absurd, sarcastic scenes full of disguised characters.

Following an artistic residency, Yassine Balbzioui created a carpet model that he entrusted to craftswomen with an ancestral know-how. These women of Douar Taznakht (near Ouarzazate in the Moroccan High Atlas) weave carpets known as ‘Ait Ouaouzguite’ which are famous for the brightness of their colours and the quality of their wool. Using a manufacturing process from another time, the production of these carpets is characterized by slowness. The work becomes public, exposed in a space anchored in the present, while also standing in stark contrast to the speed of contemporary life. This juxtaposition of two different temporalities, of two different practices settles like a form of resistance.

Yassine Balbzioui, Embouteillages, 2020
Mixed techniques on wall, mixed techniques on wood panels
Commissioned by Manifesta 13 Marseille
Supported by Ammodo, Drosos Foundation, Pébéo
Courtesy of the artist

The work Embouteillages is a series of paintings on both sides of the Metro Station Noailles, unfolding an archive of images collected onsite, processed through the artist’s imagination. During his artistic residency, Yassine Balbzioui set up a workshop in the market of Place des Capucins: a crossroad of stories, encounters and tensions. The artist opened himself up to interactions and confrontations in order to construct narratives based on a combination of people’s stories and his own imagery. The characters and situations in his work are staged between fiction, absurd and unusual. They combine hybrid, unconventional, heterogeneous and ordinary aspects, all strongly anchored in the present. By forging links between visible and the invisible, Balbzioui’s works create spaces where anything is possible, relating new perspectives and possible universes that are subject to all interpretations.

* Work conceived for the occasion of Manifesta 13 Marseille

https://yassinebalbzioui.com/