Archive
Tarek Lakhrissi
Unfinished Sentence II
11.11.2023 – 21.01.2024
Paradise Exists in the Shadow of the Sword Tarek Lakhrissi’s Unfinished Sentence II
The title of this text has been drawn from Monique Wittig’s 1969 novel Les Guérillères . Within this spellbinding tale, a lesbian warrior clan of women revolt against patriarchy, claiming land as their own and tearing apart the sexism that infiltrates language and mythology. Through collective acts of rebellion, destructive ideologies and violent behaviours are transformed into wreckages of a lethal past. Deep kinship nourishes the relationships between these rebels, as they strive for a world where swords are no longer a routine accessory.
Sprouting from the pages of this work of fiction, Tarek Lakhrissi’s Unfinished Sentence II builds on the novel’s twin themes of rebellion and restoration. Echoing Les Guérillères’s quest for a more loving future, this installation carves pathways for more empathetic ways of being. Playing with light, sound and sculpture, gothic, utopic and romantic elements collide within its emotive vortex. Fictional characters such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Xena the Warrior Princess are sonically brought into the fold within a sound piece created by Ndayé Kouagou, as audiences find their own path through a maze of suspended metal spears. Hallucinatory, eerie and beguiling, this textural amalgamation unlocks a pantheon of emotions.
Literature forms the bedrock of Tarek Lakhrissi’s practice. Prior to stepping into visual arts, Lakhrissi worked in a queer bookstore called Les Mots à la Bouche for six years whilst studying literature and theatre in Paris. During this period, he attended countlessexhibitions, screenings, and readings and began to organise queer talks and events at the Les Mots à la Bouche. Lakhrissi’s own poetic practice began to take shape within this habitat as he started to perform his own work and produce collaborative performances and films with peers—cultivating an experimental practice which mobilises language as a raw material.
This anchoring in language continues to fuel each of Lakhrissi’s projects. Aspects of sound, sculpture and other visual media are woven into installations and performances which compose poetry in tangible, embodied contexts. In The Straight Mind and Other Essays , Monique Wittig demarcates the material, physical impact language has upon bodies, ‘language casts sheaves of reality upon the social body, stamping it and violently shaping it’, ‘this oppression has its origin in the abstract domain of concepts, through the words that formalise them’. 1 It’s often hard to grasp this material aspect of an immaterial facet of culture. Language is something spoken between lips, scrawled on pages or typed into screens, yet never physically grasped in our hands.
Within his work, Lakhrissi reverses this abstract quality of language, giving form and shape to immaterial exchanges and poetic verses. Borne from questions of endurance and existence, his projects explore how one lives within a queer, racialised body in the hostile reality of our contemporary. The boundless potential of love runs as a constant throughout his work, operating in tandem with seeds of intimacy, magic and self-preservation.
Much like the imagery or metaphor embedded in prose, visual motifs overlap and intermingle within the make-up of Unfinished Sentence II . Spears flourish into metal petals, other’s warped frames create suspended knots of gnarled metal, whilst some form into axes, arrowheads or stakes. Purple light seeps through this plethora of metal figures, punctuating their meeting with a sense of romance, mystique and melancholy. A medley of sirens and samples from the theme tunes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Xena: Warrior Princess inject sonic sounds of disobedience, courage and resistance. Layered and sliced between one another, a cacophonous, riotous mixture builds in the space.
Discussing the distinct character of varying tongues, novelist Herta Müller states that, “each language has different eyes sitting inside its words”. 2 Within Unfinished Sentence II , languages of texture, sound, light and colour intermingle, opening countless emotional portals through their interactions with one another—concocting a distinct sensorial tonic which soaks through audiences. What emerges from this evocative blend is an otherworldly, somewhat discordant space. The presence of these mangled swords evokes the sense of a deserted battlefield, the purple light brings the feeling of nightlife, of club culture, whilst the dangling weapons with their various offshoots also resemble shooting stars or constellations. All at once celebratory, mournful and beautiful, visitors are transported to a utopia that is far from harmonious.
In his study of queer spaces, José Esteban Muñoz examines the development of historic liberatory, ‘free spaces’ and stresses the immense value of these utopic environments. Muñoz contends that queer clubs, record stores, cafes and cruising zones offer vital respite to act on restricted behaviours and to enact a future worth fighting for. Political dynamics are bound within the spatial parameters of these zones, with their thresholds offering dual senses of relief, restoration and invigoration for those operating outside the hegemonic contours of society. Drawing on the unique temporality of these sites, Muñoz poses that:
“Utopia is not prescriptive; it renders potential blueprints of a world not quite here, a horizon of possibility, not a fixed schema. It is productive to think about utopia as flux, a temporal disorganization, as a moment when the here and now is transcended by a then and a there that could be and indeed should be”. 3
This sense of temporal flux pulses through Unfinished Sentence II. Signifiers from divergent eras, geographies and genres are bound together, weaving a temporal and spatial textile which refuses to be moored to any recognisable time or place. The lavender light serves as an ode to the 1970s French feminist Mouvement de Libération des Femmes. The iridescent spears mimic both ancient weapons and the self-protective instruments of Buffy and Xena, and the installation itself could be plucked from a futuristic sci-fi film set, or an astronomical map. Literally suspended in space and time by interlocking chains, this labyrinth offers a moment of pause, of atemporality for audiences to interact with. Joined by Lakhrissi’s collected heroines, audiences navigate this temporal and spatial patchwork, an otherworldly ‘blueprint’ as Muñoz puts it—encouraging a reflection of what has been, what is and what could be.
Although undeniably dreamy and absorbing, this piece is nonetheless grounded in reality. The prevalence of weapons and warriors within its making translates the sense of threat that marginalised people continue to face. The need for self-protection and self-defence is palpable, as is a sense of immense adoration, tenderness and respect for those who have fought for more loving ways of being.
This sense of care is extended to audiences interacting with Unfinished Sentence II. Lakhrissi has spoken about his commitment to making gallery spaces more welcoming and accessible environments. Destabilising the intimidation of traditional white-cube spaces, which demand hegemonic codes of display and hierarchical behaviours, audiences are invited to physically interact with his installations. The distance between the artwork and the viewer is diminished and replaced with a sense of intimacy, reincarnating the gallery space as a sensorial playground. The title also nods to this sense of conversation and engagement Lakhrissi aims to ignite with audiences. Each visitor brings alternative responses, or additional clauses to this ‘unfinished sentence’, and the work itself also shifts with each presentation, forming in response to the architectural composition of each new space. Fluid, amorphous and porous, Unfinished Sentence II troubles learnt interactions with art, and instead poses pathways for more radical forms of kindness.
In her recent work, On Freedom , Maggie Nelson positions art as a crucial arena for experimentation and debate. Within our current cultural climate, which so readily clamps down on those who believe otherwise, art can be used as an instrument to amplify voices and stories muted by oppressive cultural tides. She heralds art as ‘a place to engage in open-ended experiments’, to mix together ‘extremity, wildness, satire, defiance, taboo, beauty, and absurdity’ and to ‘make space for anarchic gestures and urges that might otherwise rip apart (for better or worse) social norms or fabric’. 4 This statement resonates so powerfully with Unfinished Sentence II , which contains all these absurd, beautiful and defiant ‘anarchic gestures’ as Nelson puts it. Pop cultural icons, feminist history, archaeological fragments, astrology, literature, magic and sexuality all interlace within its radiant potion. Unpicking generic perceptions of queer community, utopia is mobilised by Lakhrissi as an apparatus to trace a more intricate portrait of his experiences as a queer person of colour and to conjure a cosmos which prioritises love above all else.
Fran Painter-Fleming
1 Monique Witting, ‘Preface’ in The Straight Mind and Other Essays (Boston: Beacon Press Books, 1992) p. 9.
2 Herta Muller, extract from ‘The Space Between Languages’ trans. Julia Sherwood, a speech given in Prague to honour Radika Denemarková (April 2012). Available at: www.asympotejournal.com/nonfiction/her- ta-muller-the-space-between-languages
3 José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009). p. 97.
4 Maggie Nelson, On Freedom, Four Songs on Care and Restraint (Lon-don: Vintage Books, 2022) p 62.