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Soufiane Ababri
198 Plays6 months ago
Soufiane Ababri's work took us to The Curve, a difficult space at the Barbican that Ababri worked to his advantage and to the delight of these two exhibitionistas. The artist's work explores notions of diaspora, immigration, colonial trauma, post-colonial issues, queerness and much more. But most of all it is a delightful installation of magnificent drawings for their skilled unskillfulness and their recording of queer love, tenderness, sex and life.
The exhibition is called "Their mouths were full of bumblebees but it was me who was pollinated", and it was a commission specifically for the, well, curved space of The Curve.
For more information: https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2024/event/soufiane-ababri
Follow Soufiane Ababri on Instagram: @soufianeababri
Follow us: exhibitionistas_podcast
Music by: Sarturn
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Transcript
Introduction to Sufjan Ababri's Exhibition
00:00:09
Speaker
Hello, fellow exhibitionists. Emily here. So glad that you could join us this week. We're going to be looking at Moroccan artist Sufjan Ababari's new commission. Their mouths were full of bumblebees, but it was me who was pollinated. It's a group of drawings that explores questions desire and queerness and diaspora.
00:00:30
Speaker
but in possibly the most innocent, joyful, wonderful, unexpected way. It was an exhibition that I'm not sure I expected to like it quite as much as I did.
Barbican's Unique Space and Architecture
00:00:42
Speaker
It's in a space in the Barbican that was new to me that I'd never been to before that is really, really quite special and unique. It featured a chain curtain, of all things.
00:00:54
Speaker
But it was really wonderful and Joanne and I had a great time talking about it. So I hope that you enjoy it too. Thanks so much for joining us.
00:01:06
Speaker
Hello, welcome back to Exhibitionistas.
Podcast's Art Focus and Episode Milestone
00:01:09
Speaker
For those of you who are new here, on this podcast we talk about the thrills and the chills, the highs and the lows, the comedy and the drama of exhibitions, particularly contemporary art ones. We love going to shows and talking about them and the joy of that is a multiplied exponentially by having you here with us.
00:01:30
Speaker
My name is Emily Harding. I'm an art lover and an exhibition goer. And hello, I am Joanna Piernevos, an independent writer, curator, and artistic director of Drawing Now Art Fair. So Emily, this is our 10th episode. Can you believe it? No way. Monumental. So happy.
00:01:49
Speaker
And it is the first time we'll be talking about an exhibition at the Barbican, which is a brutalist, historical building that we both love so much. So I'm really, really excited about this one. And also, I want to say hi to our listeners in Japan.
00:02:05
Speaker
our listeners in South Africa, in Moldova, in Sweden. I mean, you are listening to the podcast all over the world and it fills us with joy. It really fills us with joy. So come with us today to the Barbican.
Joanna's Cultural Week Highlights
00:02:20
Speaker
You're going to love it. You know, stick around. It's a good one that we have today. Oh, that's so cool. Hi, guys. So before we get started, Joanna, how was your week in culture?
00:02:32
Speaker
Oh my, oh my, oh my. It was a good one. It was a good one. I went to a concert this week, believe it or not. So my husband and I went to see the kills live at Troxi, which is a concert hall.
00:02:49
Speaker
in the East End and it was everything we expected it to be and more than that, it was incredible. This was really special because when I was your lodger 12 years ago, which is how we met and became fast friends. God, 12 years ago that is also kind of monumental
00:03:12
Speaker
Can you believe it? 12 years ago. So I was on my own. So my husband and my kids were still in France, and I stayed three months with you. And thank the gods and the goddesses that it was with you, that you really saved me at that time, and the kills as well. So both Yogo and I were listening to the kills separately, and it was kind of a way to be together.
00:03:35
Speaker
But other than that, the kills are just amazing. We love them. I mean, each song is a banger. So we were so happy to go. So, you know, they made me think of you and me because there's just two of them. It's incredible. Our duo. But I have a bit of gossip for you. So when I wrote to my friend, we have a WhatsApp group with another couple.
00:04:01
Speaker
And I said, listen, we're going to the Kills concert. And my friend said, say hi to Damien. Who is Damien Lewis, the actor? Yeah, so people will know him from Homeland, the American series Billions outside of the UK, but he's a really, really established actor who we find quite charming and handsome. Let's be very real about it. So my friend particularly really loves him.
00:04:28
Speaker
And the thing is, you know, that he had this horrible tragedy in his life. So his wife passed away. Helen McCroy from cancer was a really horrible thing. I think he even published a letter that she left him
00:04:43
Speaker
saying that he really needed to get a girlfriend, but not during her funeral. She was incredible. She was so funny. It was like really an incredible story and a credible way to go. I mean, in the way he talked about it was incredible. And when I saw Alice in Mo's heart on stage, it was really magical.
00:05:05
Speaker
She was shy and at the same time engaged with us, locked eyes with us, and waved to a guy who was on his own in the first line. They were just such good people. You could see that they were just these empathetic, beautiful people. And I kept thinking, oh, I'm so happy that they're together, because Damien Lewis is going out with her. And then I kept thinking, oh, I'm a 100-year-old granny, basically. I was just like, oh, it's so nice.
00:05:34
Speaker
Such a good girlfriend. So nice to see a happy ending with this story. And as we were going out at the end of the concert, I see kind of this really charming looking man. I elbowed you and I'm like, I think that's Damian Lewis. And he was. And he was surrounded by three or four people in this amazing London respectful way or British respectful way of celebrities. You can be a celebrity in this country, no issues.
00:06:04
Speaker
They were just like staying apart from him and just saying like, oh, we love you. Oh, it's so nice to see you. And I was like, oh, they're still together, Diogo.
00:06:12
Speaker
they're still together. It's so amazing that because she's a good person. And Yoko was just like, with the biggest smile, just thinking about the concert, like completely oblivious to my, you know, to my granny. You had the whole romance subplot going on. And he was like, I love this song. Yeah.
00:06:36
Speaker
He was just like still buzzing from the concert. And I wrote to my friend Amanda, believe it or not, we did see Damien. We had lunch with her and she was like, you didn't take a picture with him? Which I would never, I would rather die. I know me too. And Diogo would do it, you know, and Diogo was like,
00:06:53
Speaker
I wanted to do it, like really like digging a hole for me and pushing me into it. And I was like, why didn't you? You could have just taken a picture with him. I cannot do that. I'm not that person. I know me either. I mean, I get the urge celebrities. I get the urge, you know, I mean, so the kinds of celebrities that we have through my work.
00:07:18
Speaker
We had Banky Moon on Friday, you know, Theresa May came through, you know, so it's a little bit different. I have to say I did get really starstruck when Jacinda Ardern came to work.
00:07:32
Speaker
I mean, yeah, exactly. Is she everything you want her to be? She was, yeah. And I did an online event that Hillary Clinton contributed to. And look, I can't help it. I love her. It's like I grew up, I'm a woman of a certain age.
00:07:53
Speaker
who grew up in the States, you know, and my dad, it was like, as I was sort of becoming more politically aware, and I could see how much my dad hated her that only stoked my fire of love for her. And I get it's like, I know, right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And I get, you know, like there's lots of, you know, shortcomings there. So how was your weekend culture after I just geeked out completely?
Review of Netflix's 'Ripley'
00:08:23
Speaker
I'm going to say that my week in culture was not as good as yours, Joanna. I think you win this week in culture because once again, Netflix watching Ripley. So this is a new take on the talented Mr. Ripley. And I mean, it's great, but it's kind of a mixed bag. There's so much to be said for it. The acting is tremendous. Andrew Scott in particular, who plays Tom Ripley.
00:08:53
Speaker
He is just holding so much in his face in the absence of dialogue, which I think is a supreme challenge as an actor. And I mean, it's stunning to look at. It's in black and white. It's in Italy in the 50s. I mean, everything is absolutely just oozing with gorgeousness. It's almost intolerable.
00:09:15
Speaker
It's like every frame is this black and white gem. You know, it holds attention, which is good because I mean, look, this is not a news story, right? Patricia Highsmith wrote the book, The Talented Mr. Ripley in 1955. The downside is the characters. So the book
00:09:36
Speaker
It's about people who just left university. So in the talented Mr. Ripley movie of 1999 with Gwyneth Paltrow and Matt Damon and Jude Law and Philip Seymour Hoffman's in that movie, they're all roughly the same age, you know? And they're young, they're all sort of young. And in this movie or in this version of it, which is a series, Andrew Scott, who is 48,
00:10:02
Speaker
And then you have Dakota Fanning, who's 30. And then you have the person who plays Freddie, the Philip Seymour Huffman character, Elliot Sumner. He's a brilliant actor. Sting is their father, which was a little bit of a nice factoid. I didn't know that. Yeah, I know. Yeah. But they're only 33 years old. It just was like, what is going on here? I mean, they set out to say that it's sort of,
00:10:30
Speaker
that, you know, Dickey Greenleaf has been in Italy for 10 years to try to make it like he's in his early 30s.
00:10:41
Speaker
I don't know, the magic of movies can only go so far. The thing about the beauty is that it started to get in the way of the story. You could tell that the song photographer was just like, oh, let's just get a few more shots of statues. And oh, isn't this architecture brilliant? And let's put a few more of those in there. There's this cat that shows up at a certain point. And Peter was like, if I have to see that fucking cat one more time.
00:11:07
Speaker
You know, it's like that in a certain light and in the window. And it's like in the beginning, you're like, oh, that's cute. And then you're just like, again, why? What is this? What is this doing for the story? It just ended up being slapped in the rope of the story rather than lifting the story, which is, you know.
00:11:26
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, you know, it's good. I mean, I think the book is really the book is great. You know, I mean, it's a perfect book. It's like it holds this tension. It has these characters that you love to loathe, you know, and you kind of care. You want to know more about them, but you're repelled by them at the same time.
00:11:46
Speaker
And I think that the series gets that with the characters. It's just, you know, I think that some of the casting was maybe not as good as it makes them all around 48, you know, just make it consistent. You know, I mean, I think you're a bit more
00:12:03
Speaker
persistence than I am because I watched I think one or two episodes of it and I found it intensely, aggressively boring. I really could not endure it.
00:12:17
Speaker
It wasn't that boring. It was aggressively boring. Honestly. Yeah, it's ponderous. It's like they were trying. They were trying to test you. Anyway, so who are we talking about this week, Emily?
Themes in Sufjan Ababri's Art
00:12:34
Speaker
Yeah, so this week we'll be talking about Sufjan Ababari's exhibition. Their mouths were full of bumblebees, but it was me who was pollinated. It's an exhibition at The Curve at the Barbican. I have to say, I'm so keen to know what you're going to say about this, Joanna, because there were a couple things in there that I just thought,
00:12:55
Speaker
That is so up, Joanne, it's great. So, I mean, you know, we'll get there definitely. You know me very, very well. I was all over it, loved it.
00:13:07
Speaker
Yep. So for those of you who haven't been to the Barbican, it's an enormous arts complex in London. It's, you know, as one said, it's a brutalist architecture that, you know, has a real presence in London. And the curve is a really unique space within it. I've actually not been to the curve before. So that was quite cool for me to go there for the first time.
00:13:33
Speaker
So we'll get there in a bit more about the exhibition and the space. But for now, let's meet Sufjan. And I feel like I can say, just Sufjan, because when I was going to the Barbican, I am 99% sure I saw him on the sidewalk walking away from the Barbican. No, he was walking towards it. So much so that when I got to the exhibition, there was a guy, you know, kind of sitting on the outside of the doorway to the curve.
00:14:02
Speaker
And I was like, was Sufiana Barbara just here? I'm pretty sure I just saw him. He was like- He's joking. Yeah. And he was like, well, I don't know. Maybe, you know, maybe he was here. I don't know. This is a celebrity sighting episode, for sure.
00:14:18
Speaker
But it was one of those terrible moments, because I'd been looking at interviews of him and videos of him. So his face had been in my mind. But then when I saw this person on the street, it just didn't, the gears did not jump into action as quickly as I wanted to. It wasn't until sort of after he was a fair bit away that I was like, I think that was Sufiana Bapri. But anyway.
00:14:46
Speaker
Sufiana Babri, nothing to regret because you would not have taken a selfie with him. So that's fine. Of course, of course. So Sufiana Babri was born in 1985 in Morocco. He lives and works between Paris and Tangier. He explores themes of queerness and diaspora. His work encompasses drawing, performance and installation. So all of those things are demonstrated in this exhibition as well.
00:15:17
Speaker
And on the 30th of June, there will be a performance at the curve. I'd love to see it. Yeah, me too. I bet it would be mind-blowing. I'm in... I'm trying to go, yeah. Yeah, I should put that in my calendar.
00:15:34
Speaker
So I was thinking about, as I've been researching Sufjan, thinking about words that come to mind. And I don't know if this is exactly the right fit, but revolutionary comes to mind. He feels like someone who is... He's not someone who is describing problems. He is offering an antidote to those problems.
00:16:02
Speaker
So, I mean, sometimes you get people who, you know, in their art are saying, you know, maybe even Ariadne a bit, you know, is, you know, in her film is describing structures and, you know, how those lay across society and blackness, et cetera. Not to say that there's anything wrong with that. I mean, that's a really, really important place for human knowledge to be able to articulate and describe problems.
00:16:31
Speaker
But what I have seen in his work is that he is offering an alternative, a reality that lives alongside the status quo or the norm, if you like, that challenges that but doesn't necessarily go into describing it.
00:16:53
Speaker
and why it's there. I mean, he's interested in immigrants, homosexuals, brown-skinned people, the post-colonial generation. These are all the ways that he describes himself. And so he wants to kind of put art together that, I mean, I wouldn't even say celebrates.
00:17:15
Speaker
I mean, I don't think he's trying to celebrate even. I think he's just trying to say, here is a reality. Here it is, you know?
00:17:25
Speaker
I'm going to allow you to take a very direct look at things that you wouldn't normally have a look at. And he's not trying to sort of rank it or put a patina of celebration or praise over it. It's just, here it is. Here's what it is. And it kind of made me think of the TV show Schitt's Creek, which we love.
00:17:52
Speaker
of course, and how there was no homophobia in that show. So in that show, they weren't trying to say, here's the struggles of a gay person and here's what happens when a gay person comes out and they tell their family and the reactions of others. None of that is discussed in Schitt's Creek. It's just gay people are a part of life and it's accepted and here's how they operate in the world.
00:18:21
Speaker
It just shows you a depiction of a way of life without homophobia. And I feel like in a similar way, this is what Sufiana Babri is doing in his work, which the more I kind of found out about him and what he's doing, I just found that really admirable.
00:18:46
Speaker
That's not the only way that he is revolutionary. I mean, he is revolutionary in how he works. So he's not saying, okay, here's the way that art works. Here's all the things that I learned at art school. And I am going to try to reform this from the inside. He's not doing that. He's not a reformer. He's saying basically fuck that noise. I am going to do something different.
00:19:14
Speaker
And, you know, I saw this interview with him from five years ago. And this was for his exhibition, Making of Music. Here's a Strange and Bitter Crop. It was a show at Space.
00:19:29
Speaker
So he said that I'm going to make a conscious decision to stop what I was doing before and make a break with what he learned in art school and from the normative and stereotypical French education system. So he was born in Morocco, but he moved to France when he was 18.
00:19:45
Speaker
And that's where drawing has no important place and is even marginalized. So he goes to drawing because it is the antithesis of sort of the high art that is, you know, praised in art school. And he also does this thing where he does his drawing
Artistic Techniques and Symbolism
00:20:08
Speaker
in bed. He has this whole section of works that are called bed works. So his idea is that in
00:20:15
Speaker
a lot of the great works of art you see, the muse as being extraordinarily passive, lying down somewhere, a naked woman on a sofa or black and brown people that might be just sort of lounging around or what have you. And he specifically draws lying down because even that is the antithesis
00:20:39
Speaker
to how you're told you're supposed to do it. I mean, even if you were doing drawing, quote unquote, correctly, you might be at a drafts table or something like that. But he does it from a reclined position.
00:20:53
Speaker
But yeah, so that was, I mean, this whole drawing thing, I imagine, you know, and really, really focusing on that. I imagine that was music to your ears. Yes, yes. I mean, he was born in 85. So of course, back in the day when he went to France, I mean, he speaks French fluently. It's probably his second language because Morocco was a French protectorate for a long, long time until the 50s.
00:21:19
Speaker
And of course, French is still a very strong language there. And that's kind of the already this condition of the colonized country and the colonized country through the language is very strong in Moroccan artists and writers and even filmmakers.
00:21:37
Speaker
And when you hear him speak, because I also kind of listened to a video of his, I mean, you know, French, pure French. So, you know, there's already that kind of dichotomy in the identity already. And then you add drawing to it, which, of course, when he studied back in the day, drawing was not recognized, you know, really. I think that has changed within academia in France. I have to say that because now there is a chair
00:22:05
Speaker
dedicated to drawing, to drawing in an expanded sense. So sometimes, you know, my colleague Barbara Haswayier was the director of that chair, and she did an amazing job. She, you know, contacted artists who were working with drawing, but also how drawing connected to, say, for example, motion capture devices. So she
00:22:27
Speaker
invited Michel Paison, for example, to speak. He's working with investigation in neurology, in the neurology department, and he's drawing with his eyes through motion capture devices. And so, you know, there's lots of things being done at the moment in France. But again, to your point, they are kind of embedded in academia as research or as being very topical things like, say, a vitrine maker or, you know,
00:22:56
Speaker
Novotrin, vitrei, I have the word in French, tainted glass art, all of those things. Those people she invited, of course, kind of are embedded in a certain tradition. And I agree that drawing is still kind of, we're trying for it not to be, but the recognition of drawing is so recent. It started in the 60s,
00:23:18
Speaker
through conceptual arts a lot. So conceptual arts picked up photography and drawing as those two mediums and not dramas anymore, but mediums, so from the idea of media, as the two art languages that weren't tainted by tradition and that weren't bourgeois.
00:23:38
Speaker
So drawing kind of suddenly came to the forefront of artistic languages because it wasn't carrying that tradition. So in some ways Sufiana Babri is connecting to that
00:23:53
Speaker
political gesture, but with a completely different style. So his style of drawing is the very skilled, unskilled drawing that I love, of which we will be talking about later on. But I just wanted to say, to corroborate what you just said, the first drawing that you see in the exhibition is a scene. So the drawings are very colorful.
00:24:18
Speaker
And they are very laboriously made like a child would make drawings. So they're kind of everything is, you know, colored in and the shapes are very approximative, but super expressive. And so you see a billiard table and someone with the black ball trying to hit it, like the final ball that you kind of hit in a billiard table or a snooker table.
00:24:46
Speaker
And there's a hole where the ball is going and you can see that he's going to hit it and he's going to probably get it right. And then there's a sentence saying, working on changing the rules. So that's the first drawing that you see, which I found really, really interesting and kind of says what it does, what you're saying, which is,
00:25:09
Speaker
I am not here to complain, I am here to show you a reality, and through this sharing of experiences, maybe we'll change the rules together. That's beautiful, you know, a way of starting an exhibition. Yeah, because the cue ball, with his cue, he is hitting the black ball to the cue ball, so obviously it's the opposite way around, which is good, yeah.
00:25:34
Speaker
But I have to say, just to back up to working in bed, what a good idea. What a good idea. It made me think we should have a bed for sleeping and a bed for working somewhere. I went to Monticello, so the home of Thomas Jefferson years ago when it lived in D.C.
00:25:59
Speaker
And he had this he had this setup in his bedroom where it was like the bed was in the middle and was essentially like if you imagine a wall between two rooms, imagine a break in that wall for a bed. So you almost I mean, from how I remember it, it's almost like the bed is what connects the two rooms. And on one side,
00:26:22
Speaker
is a desk where he can do his writing and that kind of thing. And on the other side is sort of a reading room. I remembered like books and a chair and things like that.
00:26:37
Speaker
So it was like, I mean, yeah, yeah, exactly. I was like, genius, this is genius. You know, and I mean, obviously, he's gonna have, you know, a slave, you know, as a slave holder, bring him coffee and things like that to his room.
00:26:55
Speaker
So a very unsultry, you know, terrible underbelly to all this. But, but this setup, the Hermit and me completely romanticized the idea. Oh, my God. Oh, my. Oh, my. Oh, my. I know a few artists who have beds in their studios.
00:27:15
Speaker
And I had a sofa bed in my office before. That was exactly for that, because at a certain point you need to sleep in order for the words to set in and to settle in your mind.
00:27:30
Speaker
That's when I reconnected with sleeping. I've reconnected with sleeping very recently, and I acted upon it. I was like, yes, I need to have a sofa bed. And it was really, really amazing. I didn't use it as often as I thought I would, because I'm always running behind some deadline. But that's kind of incredible. And also, you know, to connect with Sufjan Ababri, the thing that he talks about is that in, you know,
00:27:58
Speaker
you mentioned the slave who would have been serving, Thomas Jefferson. In the 19th century in France, there was a bit of an aestheticization of Arab bodies and black and brown bodies in general, and they were often represented in painting lying down.
Queer Culture and Misconceptions
00:28:20
Speaker
And there's this connection with the idea of being lazy, because of course, Europeans always think that other cultures are lazy. And so for him, working lying down is also this thing of, well, yes, I am taking up that stance and I'm making work with it. And I'm also making work that is drawing
00:28:45
Speaker
in a childlike manner that is supposed to bring in another subject, which is that, so the exhibition has a lot of drawings that depict nightlife, that depict this kind of setting in clubs where you dance and when sometimes you kind of like cruise. So I'm gonna make a reference here to, it's the second time we talk about Sarah Marshall's podcast, You're Wrong About.
00:29:14
Speaker
She has an amazing episode at the moment going on. I think it's in part two with Marcus McCann about George Michael. Yes. I've heard this episode. I haven't heard the second one yet. Yeah. It just came out. And so you're wrong about is usually about maligned people and trying to understand their side of the story. So she's fascinated with Tony Harding,
00:29:42
Speaker
Britney Spears, all of those people. There's another one about Britney Spears that's quite interesting. And so George Michaels, the second episode, is really interesting because Marcus McCann talks about cruising.
00:29:56
Speaker
And he talks about cruising in a really interesting way, which is he talks about what cruising is, which is basically just going to outdoor spaces where you can meet people and you can have sex in public spaces, but not like in public, like not in the wild.
00:30:15
Speaker
in public bathrooms, you know, in hiding spaces, but meeting publicly. And so there's a whole vocabulary to it. There's a whole ritual to it. So you first lock eyes with someone, blah, blah, blah. And so because George Michael was infamously caught cruising, basically, or in the bathroom with another guy by the police and was arrested. And it was a whole thing, you know, it was forced to come out because of that.
00:30:45
Speaker
and Marcus McCann says something really interesting which is that at the time cruising and in general being homosexual had this thing attached to it which was think of the children you know oh yeah what about the children what about the children yeah clutching the pearls and yeah exactly clutching your pearls and thinking which is still the language now used with trans people
00:31:14
Speaker
pervert our children, their perverted beings, and cruising is horrible because they're exposing themselves. And there's a study that was made, according to Marcus McCann, which was horrible. Basically, they placed the police-placed cameras in those bathrooms to see what the behavior was. That's a violation of rights, surely. I mean, that's unacceptable. You can't do that. You can't do that. This was in the 80s and it was just shameful.
00:31:43
Speaker
But it was interesting because the result was that, you know, men, two, three men, whatever, would be having sex in a public bathroom. And as soon as you could hear a creak of a door opening, they would run away and hide or dress themselves. So this just showed that no one was exposing themselves. They were not keen on being found out. And so no children were harmed in the making of this sexual pleasure of cruising.
00:32:12
Speaker
whatsoever. The idea is that they were not wanting anyone to kind of step in and see them. It's like, where else are they going to meet people? I mean, gay clubs are, you know, being closed by police at the time. You know, it's like there's...
00:32:31
Speaker
Yeah. And I mean, it was pre-internet, so you're not going to meet people online. It's like, yeah, if you make it so that there's absolutely no other way for people to connect, for gay people to connect, of course, they're going to find a way and that was it. I mean... And that was it. Yeah. And there was nothing wrong with it. And like Marcus McCann says,
00:32:53
Speaker
it's not just a gay thing, come on, you know, there's cruising in heterosexual, in the heterosexual world and there's a lot of ways of having sex and it concerns no one and it suddenly does not concern the children. And Sufjana Babri says that for him drawing like a child is also a way of bringing some innocence into this
00:33:16
Speaker
realm of this world that is his world, basically, and his identity, which is his identity, not only as a gay man, but also as a non-white man, also as an Arab man, a hairy man. There's a lot of hair, body hair in the drawings that is so beautiful.
00:33:37
Speaker
because it reads the gesture of drawing, you know, hair, just black graphite or black colored pencils. It's just beautiful. And he says, you know, and also some gay people that are depicted there, all of them, were children at some point.
00:33:53
Speaker
Right. And it was difficult being a gay child in Morocco. It's even difficult here, to be honest, because he doesn't separate. I mean, he does separate the specific context in Morocco, because there's a drawing called Alambusquade, which means the ambush, where you see people crawling and the performances also that people crawling in the space, they're crawling outside a nightclub and you can see the police coming in.
00:34:20
Speaker
And you also have a trans person, so someone who has a male genitalia and breasts. There's a whole community in the drawings. But like you say, it's very ambivalent. You don't really know what's going on. And there's this innocence of pleasure.
00:34:39
Speaker
and of being together and togetherness. And I think one of my favorite works are really the bedworks where it's a very long, long, long drawing. I can tell you exactly the length of the drawing. Oh, they don't have the measurements in their captions. Oh, that's too bad. But they're kind of like 80, 90 centimeters long and very, and like 40, 50 centimeters high.
00:35:05
Speaker
And there's just these bodies, these elongated bodies, there's one on top of the other, which are kind of incredible. So there really is this idea of bringing a certain kind of drawing to a space like the Barbican.
00:35:23
Speaker
Knowing that he is bringing that innocence to the subject matter and, you know, that kind of childlikeness, that just makes my affection for the works grow so much. I mean, this is the reason why knowing this kind of stuff is so important. Because, like, you could easily go in there and be like, you know, colored drawings of, you know,
00:35:48
Speaker
Naked men together like what is this about for me? And it's like when you know like what he is trying to create and what's coming across both in You know what he is depicting how he is depicting it even how he's working You know, you know kind of the bedworks etc. It's it just makes it so powerful and
00:36:11
Speaker
So maybe I should try and describe the exhibition because I've seen this very strange review and timeout saying that he didn't know what to do with the space of the curve. I saw that too.
00:36:26
Speaker
I saw that too. I saw that before I went, and so I was very curious, but I would disagree with that reviewer, absolutely. But there's a real vibe the second you get into the space.
00:36:44
Speaker
So it's called the curve for a reason. It's a curve of the building. And when you go in, the mood is dark. Everything is kind of low light everywhere. And when you walk in, there is the most incredible hanging curtain of chains.
00:37:10
Speaker
And that also creates a curve. So it's only kind of right at the beginning and then there's another hanging curtain of chains at the end that kind of almost make parentheses if you were looking from above around the exhibition.
00:37:30
Speaker
And I loved them so much. Oh my gosh, the touching them. I honestly, I could have spent so much time just like with- It was a super sensual, yeah, sensual and dangerous at the same time, because the chains are not big enough to be chains that chain you, that kind of are used to prevent movement.
00:37:55
Speaker
So they could be chains used in S&M or chains just used for necklaces. But they're quite thick. They're too thick to be a necklace, for example. So they're kind of ambivalent. And the thing with the curve, and that's why I was so shocked with the review, was like, this dude did not read the text. Because when he arrived, Sufiana Barbri, to the space, he saw that the space had the same shape
00:38:22
Speaker
as the letter Zayn in Arabic. And the letter Zayn is the beginning of the word. So it's the sound Z. And that's why the title talks about bees who buzz and do the Z sound. So Z for him is a representative of a slur which is a zamel.
00:38:48
Speaker
which is what the F-word would mean in, I don't like to say it, the faggot word means in Arabic. And so when you want to insult gay men, you just do the Z sound. You don't need to say the whole word. So the Zayn letter for him is very expressive.
00:39:12
Speaker
in the sense that it makes him think of that slur. So the curtains are also shaped like the curve. And so they kind of reiterate that letter. But the interesting thing is that Zamul actually in the beginning meant a strong friendship between men. So what he's saying, and that's why you're so right in saying that he's not denouncing. He really is kind of showing
00:39:39
Speaker
how you can be friendly with another man. So what he says is that the homophobia even prevents men from being close together and from having a beautiful straight friendship or a platonic friendship. And it really prevents men from coming together and sharing experiences. And in a lot of the drawings, it's never the sexual act.
00:40:07
Speaker
It's always before or after, and some of them are even just tender moments between men. Totally, yeah. I loved the way that he used the physical space to reinforce that message, and everything is built from that, which is
00:40:26
Speaker
Yeah, really powerful. I have to say, I have not spent much time in Morocco, but in Palestine, I remember when I very first got there in 2005, and seeing young men in Jerusalem holding hands, or walking down the street, arm in arm.
00:40:51
Speaker
you know, as a Western person that reads as gay men, you know, I mean, and I was with my friend and I was like,
00:41:00
Speaker
Yeah, I didn't expect that, you know, and she was like, yeah, I mean, if you have an open society, yeah. And, um, and, you know, it was, you know, she, she made it clear. It's like, you know, if you asked any Palestinian, they say they would say, there's no homosexuals in Palestine. I mean, that would be the understanding.
00:41:22
Speaker
Yeah, of course. But there's more room for heterosexual men to have close physical contact. In my experience in Palestine, there seem to be very
00:41:37
Speaker
open expressions of affection between heterosexual men. Homosexuality is so repressed. It's got to come out somewhere, right? It's got to come out somewhere. It's like in football because we talk about repressed societies in the Middle East, but
00:41:58
Speaker
I, you know, it's like any football coach, maybe perhaps until 10 years ago, would have said there's no gay people in football, which is statistically impossible. So let's not pretend that we are such an open society because we are not. And the spaces where, you know, female football, you know, most of them are lesbians, like people say that. Oh, most, most women who play football are lesbians, which like, yes and no. Yeah, yes and no, but.
00:42:28
Speaker
In male football, I'm sure that a lot of coaches will say, no, there's no gay people here because, you know, football is a manly sport. And I heard that many, many times. So...
00:42:41
Speaker
Repression comes in many compartments here in the Western, or in Europe, let's say, and also in the Western world, where it is seemingly accepted, but in some ways it's even worse, because outside of London, who's the gay couple who can kiss in public or hold hands? It's difficult. It can be done.
00:43:03
Speaker
But it's not easy. It's not an easy thing to do. I think it's time for a little break, don't you think, Emily? I think so. Yeah, sounds good. Okay, we'll speak to you in just a little while.
00:43:27
Speaker
Welcome back everyone. So just as we start to talk more about the exhibition, I think it's important for us just to take you into the space of the curve. So like I said, I've been to the Barbican tons of times and I've never been into the space. And I walked in, it's near the shop and I saw
00:43:49
Speaker
the promotion of the exhibition on the wall in front of me. And to the left, there was some stairs, and I almost went down there. And then the guy was like, oh no, you've got to go this way. So it went to the right, and you go through these giant doors, and you are in a very different world than the rest of the museum, than the rest of the complex, really.
00:44:11
Speaker
And you go in, and you're immediately in a dark space. And as we've said, it's a curve, so it curves around. So you can't see the entire space when you go in. Oh, good point. Yes. Yeah. So all you're seeing is the hanging curtain, which is a few meters after you get in. And obviously, there's a bit of text on the right-hand side when you walk in that talks about
00:44:40
Speaker
the exhibition and about Sufjan. And on the floor, there's a red pathway, you know, so there's a big red stripe on the floor on the right hand side that goes all along the right hand side of the curve that actually goes up the wall as well. So that red stripe is sort of, you know, kind of not halfway up the wall, maybe a quarter up the wall.
00:45:02
Speaker
It's dark. There's kind of mood music going on because he wanted to make it look like scenes from a club. So, but the music is not clubby music. Like I didn't feel that I wanted to dance to it. It was sort of, and so you walk in, you've got the red, you've got the chain curtain in front of you. It's dark. You have this mood music and you don't see any images. You don't see any art until you get past that chain
00:45:33
Speaker
And all of the art is only on the inside
Exhibition Atmosphere and Experience
00:45:37
Speaker
of the curve. There's nothing on the outside of the curve other than this red stripe that goes a bit up the wall. Otherwise, it's complete darkness over there.
00:45:48
Speaker
And so it is it is a feeling like it is such a strong, you know, evocative set of, you know, circumstances that kind of take you into what he's going to show you. And like you said, the first image is of this billiard table.
00:46:08
Speaker
And again, he's childlike in his drawing. You know, there's rare, there's real precision, but imprecision. And there's saturated colors. He's using colored pencils. And use a full colors. Yeah, really strong colors. Yeah, these aren't these aren't your child's colored pencils, for sure. Yeah.
00:46:31
Speaker
And there's the image of the billiard table. And as you noted earlier, working on changing the rules is written in the upper right-hand side. And that's kind of like you're in the curve of this chain curtain, and there's this one image.
00:46:53
Speaker
And because it's so dark in there, there's spotlights on each of the images. So that's really the only thing that you're seeing clearly in the room is the images themselves.
00:47:06
Speaker
And the drawings are all on the left side of the exhibition, which means that the curves, or the curved wall, and you see the people who are also just there in the space from the Barbican, and they kind of walk along. And you feel like there's a nightclub vibe on the left and a museum vibe on the right. On the right, a nightclub vibe. And on the left, an old, tiny, museum-like vibe. Because you see people walking like in a nightclub.
00:47:35
Speaker
And then there's that music that is a bit ominous. So you're kind of in a sort of hybrid space. And then you have drawings of very specific settings and very specific bodies.
00:47:51
Speaker
That's a really good point because this red strip that's on the ground, on the right-hand side, on the outer, you could almost see that as a walkway. And if you want to, you could view things from afar. You could almost see that as the pedestrian walkway. And then if you want to cross the line into the club, you can. But there is a bit of a threshold feeling there.
00:48:17
Speaker
And now that you mention it, there were people while I was at the exhibition that did seem to stay along the outer side. It was like sort of a psychological divide. There was this one woman who was there, and look, maybe she'd been there before and just wanted to do a sweep of it again. Stroll by. Maybe she'd already had sort of a bigger look. But yeah, there is, because the curve of the
00:48:48
Speaker
chain curtain ends at that line. So it's like, you know, the chain curtain is basically the inside, is kind of framing the inside. You're inside the club. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But yeah, that is really cool. I just like, how clever, how clever to... How clever. It's so well thought through. It is, yeah. So beautiful. And then you come into this space
00:49:18
Speaker
and you're completely taken by the drawings that have, I think this could win the trophy of the exhibition with the biggest number of male genitalia in the year. I'm still in May, but I think we can already give that. Can we talk about the male genitalia, the penae? I would love it if the plural of penis would be penae, would be so nice.
00:49:47
Speaker
They're so cute. They're the most adorable penises you'll ever see with a little pink mushroomy. Oh my god, so nice with lots of hair drawn frantically around them.
00:50:05
Speaker
and they're just so beautiful. And they're being sometimes in some drawings, I'm looking at one of them because I took a few pictures, where you see the background seems like the type of light, cones of light that you have
00:50:20
Speaker
in concerts or in nightclubs. So there's kind of a golden light and then a purple light and they're wearing these glasses. They looked like 3D glasses back in the day when you had like three films in three decades and you bought them in a magazine or something. They came in a magazine, remember? And then they're completely naked and one of them to the left is dancing.
00:50:47
Speaker
I love the way he draws hands, by the way. And the other one is kind of just kind of mindlessly touching his penis. And they're just having fun. They're just kind of like there. And also what is beautiful is that the bodies are either brown, dark brown, or a bit light brown, yellowish. So they're not white bodies. And they have lots of hair. Like they have leg hair, pubic hair.
00:51:17
Speaker
chest hair and my favorites, armpit hair. Because bushes, bush-like armpit hair that is so gloriously drawn. It's drawn with affection and love. And maybe self-love, I don't know how Sufjana Babri's body is, but there's also a kind of self-depiction there, I guess. Yeah.
00:51:40
Speaker
And it's just really beautiful. And the guy on the right has blue hair. So you can see that it's an alternative space, alternative bodies, bodies that are not accepted in society in the daylight. How would these bodies behave during the day? And I loved, so he, all of the figures and all of the drawings have pink cheeks.
00:52:05
Speaker
And so he talked about how this is showing yes washing because it's the only emotion that you can't fake. I mean, there's not an actor out there.
00:52:16
Speaker
maybe Meryl Streep or something, you know, who can blush on demand. And so, you know, he wanted to incorporate that in as, you know, that's kind of an innocent thing as well, right? It's like, you know, this, you know, this, I'm, I'm having a pleasurable moment, you know, this is,
00:52:35
Speaker
This is how my body responds, and it's such a human thing. Or a post orgasmic thing as well, you know, because you can see that a lot of these drawings could be post coitum drawings, you know, they're really beautiful, tired,
00:52:52
Speaker
bodies lying down. And that could also be the blushing. But you're quite right. And it's so beautiful because you have those brown skins and then in the place where the cheeks are, you have this really powerfully drawn pink area that is so cute. It's just so nice. And there's another drawing
00:53:16
Speaker
I don't quite remember what it's called, where you have in the background these spots of color, a little bit like, again, nightclub lighting through a glass, what do you call them? Glass balls? Like disco balls? Disco balls, yes. Through a disco ball. And then you have a man in profile and the other man behind him is holding his head.
00:53:45
Speaker
And you don't know if the red is makeup or if it's blood. So you don't quite know what's going on. That's true, yeah. And again, they have the blushing thing going on. So you could see that there's a lot of stories being told at the same time. It's a very layered couple of drawings.
00:54:07
Speaker
Well, body of work, because there's superimposing stories being told. There's another drawing which is outside of a nightclub that I refer to as well, where you have different kinds of bodies. You have male bodies for sure, but you also have trans bodies.
00:54:24
Speaker
So there's different stories being told here, and he's very adamant in saying that. He's interested in post-colonial issues, in immigration issues. He's really interested in anything that is othering and connected to the history of both countries, Morocco and France as well, and Europe in general.
00:54:45
Speaker
And that was the thing that kind of touched me, which was that the first thing I thought about was that was George Michael in the cruising episode. Because like an Iranian female friend of mine was saying, she was saying, you know, in Europe, you guys think that you're very developed, but I can see how oppressed women are here as well, in completely different ways. And she was really shocked when she arrived in Europe and she saw the ads.
00:55:13
Speaker
for cause with women in bikinis and that's something that she wouldn't see in Iran and she didn't love it either. So that's interesting to define different kinds of oppression and to understand different kinds of oppression or tacit repression, ingrained repression as well.
00:55:38
Speaker
It's really interesting to see that. Yeah, definitely. On the joyful end, one of my favorites, I think this might be my favorite, is there's a mattress on the floor. There's a guy standing, you see his back, he's naked. He's holding up like an old school iPod.
00:56:01
Speaker
And it's connected by a cord to a couple of old school-ish speakers. And then there's a guy just laying on the mattress, you know, kind of with his head on his hand, and he's propped up on his elbow, just watching this guy dance like crazy with his iPod. And on the mattress, there's a book that's open, and it just says, Men in the Sun.
00:56:29
Speaker
You know, and I just thought like, I just, you know, who can't imagine the scene in their own lives at some point in their lives, you know? Yes.
00:56:39
Speaker
Yeah.
Cultural Identity and Outsider Perspective
00:56:40
Speaker
I also had the feeling when I got in of this is really, really very far from my universe. I don't know what he's talking about. I don't experience this. I hardly ever go clubbing. And gay clubs, which are obviously for straight bisexual and lesbian females,
00:57:06
Speaker
Maybe not lesbians, but like your preferred clubs. I don't know about you, but I think, you know, that's where you feel safe and you like going if you want to have a night out without any, you know, trouble coming towards you. Yeah. So they're closing up in, you know, Vauxhall was the area where you would go and they're all, they're all closing up. And I was saying like,
00:57:28
Speaker
Lifestyle changes, also self-policing maybe. I don't know. It's just not gentrification of a lot of areas where you can't really behave the way you did before and you don't feel as free and
00:57:45
Speaker
Invisible to the rest of society as you did in I mean voxel now is not what it was back in the day It used to be like the Mecca for you know I mean my my son my stepson used to you know that was sort of his go-to as a young gay man and Exactly, and I remember a gay friend of mine telling me you know that yeah that that was just
00:58:10
Speaker
That was just the area. There were so many places to go. There was this one place called Hoist, which I loved.
00:58:18
Speaker
You know, it just the imagination runs wild, doesn't it? You know, but you could get hoisted up and like thrown into like this this Velcro wall. It's like fun, you know, I mean, yeah, just well, that's really a shame to know that there. But still I felt, oh, this is not my this is not at all my comfort zone. I don't know much about this culture. And I also thought,
00:58:46
Speaker
Having lived in France for many years, speaking the language more than fluently, writing in French, all of that, and coming across and having friends from Morocco, I also felt really ignorant. I have to say this podcast is teaching me that the more you know, the less you know, a very Socratic exercise, because I was thinking I had to look up
00:59:09
Speaker
the relationship between Morocco and France, the colonial relationship between Morocco and France, because I didn't know the story. I mean, I knew it, but I didn't know exactly. So Morocco's history is quite complex because they had to elbow their way in against Algeria. It's still unstable in the south, southwest
00:59:31
Speaker
And they were a protectorate. They weren't really a colony, as it were. I mean, they were colonized, obviously. It wasn't that long. It was like 40 years, about 40 years. But then the French imperialistic culture and power
00:59:50
Speaker
remained very strongly in the culture. I mean, if you hear Moroccan speak, they speak exactly like you speak in the rest of France. It's really, the language takes a big hold on, and the French really did colonize a lot through language and culture. And it's very strong there. And if you want to study, you go to France to study.
01:00:12
Speaker
which is exactly what Sufjana Barbry did for many reasons, I'm sure. That's kind of your aspirational thing, is to kind of come to Europe and particularly to France and study there while being fetishized. So a few writers, I'm thinking of Abde la Tayah,
01:00:31
Speaker
talk a lot about the fetishization of Arab bodies, which is almost worse in some ways, especially in the gay community, where you want to have a little Arab boy, and it's kind of positive discrimination as well, and tied to a community that is not very visible, so you can't really talk about your problems regarding that as well.
01:00:57
Speaker
And the exhibition made me think of Abdallah Tayah, actually, who is a Moroccan writer who writes in French. He writes in bad French, so it's exactly the same thing as Sufiana Barbary withdrawing. He doesn't write in academic French.
01:01:18
Speaker
He's very expressionistic in the way he writes. It's very passionate and very descriptive and very emotional. He writes in a sort of flow of consciousness. In 2018, he felt the need of writing a letter to his mum who is illiterate. There's an issue with his identity. And in 2018, the government
01:01:42
Speaker
started to devise this new rule against anything untoward in regards to the Moors. So that meant no gay propaganda in art or wherever.
Identity and Acceptance in Art
01:01:55
Speaker
And so he wrote a letter called Homosexuality Explained to My Mother. And the letter is addressed to the mum. And it's really beautiful because he does say, I'm exactly like you. The reason why I respect my own identity and talk about it is because I'm like you.
01:02:11
Speaker
You taught me how to be a person who fights for their own rights. You were the master of the house and you fought every day. And the pain of telling her that she taught him how to be himself and her not understanding that is very, you know, it's patent in the letter. And so he ends the letter by saying, in my books and in my conferences, I defend you.
01:02:38
Speaker
I tell you, I make you exist. I dream that one day, if someone insults me in front of you saying, your son, your brother is Zamel, that you might answer, no, he is not Zamel. He is Muthali. I think Muthali is like ideal or something like that.
01:02:55
Speaker
It's a word, a simple little word that changes everything. A word revolution. Decide for yourselves. I do not demand anything. I proceed. I fly as I am able. I pray, like Mother does, in my own way. I write.
01:03:13
Speaker
There is something terrible in each of us here, hatred of the Moroccan. Where does it come from? Why does it remain? Why not there to be ourselves, to break free? To break free through provocation and scandal? In any case, there is no other way, only to forget fear and face the world naked. Voila!
01:03:31
Speaker
Again, in tenderness, my truth, for you. I don't like unnecessary confrontations. I am for necessary battles. The war I wage with and against Morocco is useful. I believe that sincerely. I must not be the only one. I can speak, write. For me and for others. I do it. It's my duty. A warm salaam to you all." And this was translated from the French by Ricardo Morato.
01:03:57
Speaker
So it really made me think of the exhibition. I faced the world naked, which was exactly what you were saying. Because when you're saying in the beginning, oh, this was not combative. And I was like, she has rose-tinted glasses, doesn't she? But actually, you're absolutely right. It's just the nakedness.
01:04:17
Speaker
is there to face the world, like Abdullah Tayyar says. It's not to say, here we are, this is a pride moment. No, it really is facing the world naked. And I loved it for that. Absolutely. Yeah, that's a really beautiful, beautiful letter. Thank you for sharing that. I mean, it's such a powerful thing, isn't it? Because yeah, I mean, what does it mean to fight?
01:04:46
Speaker
You know, I mean what what does that mean does it mean to say? You don't and you must and you should have and I demand Yeah, that's part of fighting. That is definitely a valuable part of fighting but I mean this way of just saying i'm i'm here and i'm gonna be my presence known and you know i'm gonna dare to be myself to break free as he says in this letter
01:05:14
Speaker
You're exactly right, there is such a beautiful correlation between Sufjan's work and expressing what he's talking about here. I am naturally non-combative, you know? I mean, I... Non-confrontational to the end, baby.
01:05:34
Speaker
not that there's not value there. It's just not the way I'm wired to sort of have a throw down of the gauntlet. And I admire people who are in Kenki. But I love this notion of just like sidling up to the thing and being like, you know what, here it is, you know, kind of like, and it's not going anywhere. So good luck to you. But you know, this is what I am. This is what I represent.
01:06:03
Speaker
Especially when it comes to issues of identity, I think, of who you are and how you position yourself in the world and to what extent you're free to be who you are and to what extent you have to do inner work within yourself.
01:06:18
Speaker
And that's why I love what he, what Abdullah Taia says, but also Sufiana Barbri. I'm Moroccan. You know, I am of that culture. And I have to think about that culture because it's in me. And I have to defend that culture. When he says, I love you, mom, I am like you. How can you not see that I'm like you? He describes his mother screaming all the time and like, you know, just ruling that household of five children, I think, and a dad.
01:06:49
Speaker
who just screaming her lungs out and just like battling every day for things to be okay, for things to be there and to function. And that was her struggle and that was her fight. And he's not like that. He's not someone who screams, but he's screaming in another way and he's not someone who prays, but he is praying, he's writing. And this commonality positions and of fights
01:07:16
Speaker
is so beautiful to see. And this very strange dichotomy of I don't want to be that Moroccan, but I want to be that other Moroccan. I don't want that part of the culture, but I am that other part of the culture is really interesting. And it's really beautiful to see how, I think at a certain age, you've done your own
01:07:39
Speaker
identity search and then you can put it out there in a way that is non-combative and it is done with compassion and love because it's so easy to shout no, it's much more difficult to be compassionate and to bring love
01:07:57
Speaker
and humanity and find humanity in the people who hate you the most. I think that really is, and that's why I bought Maggie Nelson's book on freedom. She just published a book 2023, I think. It was at the Barbican, like right after the exhibition, I went to the bookshop and I saw the book and she struggles with that too. In the introduction, she says, you know, what does that mean to live as if you were free? Is that the solution?
Freedom, Care, and Societal Reflections
01:08:25
Speaker
Or is the solution to think of a former time where there was freedom or work towards a moment when freedom will finally be reached? How is it and this freedom tied in with care? And that's what the book is about. And I am just really very, very, you know, I'm urging to read it because I'm really interested in seeing what she says because that is the issue now, isn't it? In a polarized society, as you often say,
01:08:57
Speaker
How do you position yourself? I'm a very angry person. Now I think we have a duty of care to people who are being oppressed. I don't know. I don't know. I'm lost, Emily. I'm so lost. I don't know what to do and what to say and how to react. I think that, you know, I think not to bring it back to Schitt's Creek again and my favorite. Yes, please do. I watched it yesterday.
01:09:25
Speaker
I watched it yesterday as well, and it was the episode where Moira was running for the council, just one of my friends. But in that show, they are doing that very thing. They are assuming the fight's over.
01:09:44
Speaker
We're not going to be a show that's depicting more of the fight. We're a show depicting a reality where the fight doesn't exist. Does the fight still exist? Yes, of course. I mean, absolutely. But there is real power in doing, I think, what
01:10:04
Speaker
what Sufjana Babri is doing, which is saying, this is a thing that's here, and I'm going to show it to you, and I'm going to sidle up to you with it, with an innocence and a care and, you know,
01:10:20
Speaker
And love. There's a lot of love in there. There's a lot of joy. So not so I hope that you'll accept it, but just hopefully maybe that you'll see it. The first thought I had was like, what a stupid move, honestly.
01:10:39
Speaker
Because we have stupid thoughts as well. They just come up. I was thinking, what a stupid move. People are going to say, this is disgusting. And first of all, they're all naked. Why are they showing penises? Because when you go in, people, you are warned that there's nakedness.
01:10:54
Speaker
And that if you don't want to be confronted with that, maybe don't see the show, which I found the funniest trigger warning ever. You're naked in your bathroom in the morning, for God's sake. Do you have a trigger warning outside on your bathroom door? I mean, look in the mirror if you can't take it. Just don't look at your body.
01:11:16
Speaker
I remember having a conversation about, you know, homosexual couples adopting kids. And I was just saying, as usual, as I don't do that anymore, or I do it as a provocation, but very innocently saying like, when can this happen normally, you know, already? I'm just sick of this being an argument and looking at the person I was talking to, who I presumed was on my side.
01:11:41
Speaker
kind of looking bewildered and saying, wow, you're very progressive, aren't you? Wow. I mean, that's something to think about. Wow. And I just thought, even if you present a couple, same-sex couple who just wants to parent, which is the purest thing you can think of, those people will not be convinced.
01:12:05
Speaker
Of course it was a stupid thought. And of course you need to show a safe space where you're happy and you have pleasure and you actually can be yourself. I'm not in love with seeing penises. Like it's like not my favorite image, you know, even though his are quite sweet with the pink. But drawn like that. Come on. Yeah.
01:12:25
Speaker
It looked like pink mushrooms. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But yeah, it still, you know, it was great. I find it very joyful. I love it. It was, yeah. What is the work that you would have taken home? My favorite work was certainly the mattress on the floor and the dancing and the chilling out. That was just so, so good.
01:12:47
Speaker
What would you have taken home? My favorite drawing, and I have no idea what it's called. I took a picture of it because I really loved it. In the background, it's a corner of a room. It's not a nightlife setting. Maybe that's why I liked it because I'm not a big clubbing going out at night person. There's two men
01:13:11
Speaker
One is kneeling on his right leg and the other leg is bent. He's turning his back to us. And then there's another one who's facing us. They both have their hands in the air as if they're dancing. And so you have, from the back, a little penis hanging out, like a mushroomy, cute thing. And then the other one, obviously.
01:13:38
Speaker
is facing us which is the only red color that you have and then you have the hands are not drawn they're just drawn like hair and the bodies are full of hair full of hair you know chest hair belly hair armpit hair leg hair butt hair yeah beautiful and the and they have these haircuts as well like the fades that
01:14:08
Speaker
are now fashionable in the UK as well. And one of them has a beard and they just look so into what they're doing that their faces are very much concentrated in what they're doing. They're not showing themselves to us. And I just love it because the body is so unapologetically drawn with pleasure. And you can see the excitement because the hands are kind of like, they kind of turn into kind of
01:14:39
Speaker
branches or little twigs or hair, and they're drawn in the same way as the body hair. So I just found that really interesting. And it also takes me to the way he draws, which is probably in bed, kind of dreaming and imagining and reminiscing maybe. He says that only 10% of the people he draws are the people he knows. So he kind of probably amalgamates references stuff in his life, things he's done,
01:15:09
Speaker
And who hasn't been naked with their partner dancing in the morning when it's really hot and you put some music on? I just love it. And I love the bodies. I love the way they're drawn. I mean, the butt is just two circles. And I love also the way he draws the bodies because they're bulging. Everything's like erupting. They're kind of
01:15:31
Speaker
bloated with desire and pleasure. And those bodies in particular look like that. And I just find them so beautiful. And I would definitely have this in my home.
01:15:44
Speaker
for sure. It's a shame I don't. Good. Well, I mean, I think the bottom line here is that people should check out Sufiana Babri.
Conclusion and Call to Support Art
01:15:52
Speaker
Thank you so much Joanna. That was lovely. And thank you to all the listeners for listening from all across the world. It has just been such a joy to see more and more of you joining us on this exhibition tour.
01:16:05
Speaker
Let us know what you want to hear about, what you're seeing. You can find us on Instagram. You can rate, review, subscribe, recommend it to your friends. That would be fantastic. And we can watch this community grow even more. Thank you too, Emily. This was really, really joyful. The next episode will be focusing on La Bina he meets at the Royal Academy.
01:16:32
Speaker
So very, very happy to do an episode on this incredible artist.
01:16:37
Speaker
And yes, so until next time, have a great couple of weeks. Go see exhibitions. We go see them so that you have to. And visit your local galleries. You don't have to go to big museums. Support artists anywhere in any form. And tell us about it. Follow us on Instagram and tell us about what you've been looking at, what you've been seeing. Until next time, take care. Have a great life. And bye, Emily. Thank you. Bye bye. Take care.
01:17:07
Speaker
Thank you.