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Soufïa Bensaïd

Residency
Résidence d'été
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© Soufïa Bensaïd—Fragile, 2016—Credit photo : genevieve rivard

Communiqué ▼ | Biographie ▼

Press Release ▼ | Biography ▼

In her life path, Soufïa Bensaïd has been fortunate enough to be in different cultural, social and professional environments: Tunisia, where she was born, France, where she studied and Quebec, where she lives. It's a journey that allows her to experience a changing identity, to question shifts in perception and the identity and existential foundations of the individual. After graduating from a leading French engineering school, she turned her attention to communications issues. A self-taught artist, she received customized training from nationally and internationally renowned artists invited to Canada. She has presented exhibitions, performances, workshops, public interventions, publications and artist residencies in Canada, the United States, Italy, Spain, France, Finland, Cyprus, India and Tunisia.

Site web de l'artiste

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Communiqué

Que reste-t-il du passé? is a residency-installation playing with 16 years of studio archives (2007-2023). An ephemeral, necessary work, approached as a ritual of passage, bringing together traces of the past and present. A constellation of visual and written works, performance objects, artifacts and artistic materials. Soufïa Bensaïd returns to a process of creation already activated in the past during pivotal periods, notably Ce que j'ai aimé faire avant 40 ans (2011, Galerie Articule): a performance and list made daily for a year according to a precise protocol before her 40th birthday. In this work-in-residence, artists will be invited to reinterpret archives of their choice. Whatever is not transformed, reactivated or conserved by the guest will be disintegrated, reduced and returned to nature in a performance that will close the residency in a collective ritual outside the city. 
 
Que reste-t-il du passé? addresses the question of mourning. It's a project that invites us to plunge into a process of abandonment and acceptance.
How can we celebrate the past and make space? Is it really an end when a cycle comes to an end?
How do we experience the completion of one journey and the blossoming of another?
How do archives invite us to create a space for transformation, for transmuting the past into the present? 

 

Biographie

In her life path, Soufïa Bensaïd has been fortunate enough to be in different cultural, social and professional environments: Tunisia, where she was born, France, where she studied and Quebec, where she lives. It's a journey that allows her to experience a changing identity, to question shifts in perception and the identity and existential foundations of the individual. After graduating from a leading French engineering school, she turned her attention to communications issues. A self-taught artist, she received customized training from nationally and internationally renowned artists invited to Canada. She has presented exhibitions, performances, workshops, public interventions, publications and artist residencies in Canada, the United States, Italy, Spain, France, Finland, Cyprus, India and Tunisia.

Site web de l'artiste