PORTFOLIO – 26

GHIZLANE SAHLI – LOOKING WITHIN

By Nii B. Andrews

Ghizlane Sahli is emphatic and uncompromising about taking us on a journey within ourselves because she believes that is the only viable way to understand the universal principles underlying reality.

Sahli has elected to use recognizable graphic organic images to illustrate this journey within.

The images are fundamental to man- organs; heart, brain, lungs and gut. In Sahli’s art, these are rendered as delicate figures in 2D or embellished objects in 3D.

Are the embellishments on the heart a reference to the encrustations and excrescences acquired from the vagaries of modern living…..cholesterol plaques, infarcted walls?

The same reality is reflected in her 3D models of the brain and gut.

But in 2D these same organic elements are rendered ever so delicately and in their pristine condition – and often with their uncanny geometric accuracy intact.

Is this a reference to the innocence of youth before the assault of the vicissitudes of life?

And or is it a reflection on and acknowledgement of the perfection of the creation?

But Sahli is far from done.

She takes us further and deeper by helping us to deconstruct and conceptualize the whole journey.

How, and by what means?

She goes on her own personal journey starting with the ubiquitous waste product of a consumerism gone ape – running amok – with a shameful destructive force that ruins almost everything.

It all starts with her collecting thousands of discarded plastic water bottles that once carried vital nourishment needed within our bodies, but now threaten to harm us.

She cleans and cuts them into small pieces/?cells, which she covers  with vegetable silk threads and then hangs them on shaped pieces of metal mesh.

The unknown origin of each plastic bottle notwithstanding, each bottle’s permanent location and function has now been resolved by Sahli.

She still has no hesitation in “pimping” garbage and transmuting it to gold.

Unknown to known; indefinable to definite; darkness to light.

Sahli through her work posits the above as the destination of our individual and collective journey if and when we are prepared to look within.

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GHIZLANE SAHLI EXHIBITION – “Histoires de Tripes”

David Bloch Gallery, Marrakech

From Feb 9 – March 15, 2018.

Images are courtesy of the David Bloch Gallery.

 

 

2 thoughts on “PORTFOLIO – 26”

  1. Wow, great work with a latent inclination towards medicine. Possibly endocrinology?

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