Installation view of Manière noire, générale et absolue (Black, general and absolute Manner), 2021

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Triptych: photographic print (Absolue), forged residency permits (Général), mezzotint engraving (Noire), dimensions variable

 

Strangehood, kebab restaurant, Porte Saint-Denis, Paris. Curated by Alara Villa

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200 cm × 85 cm, 10 cm × 7.4 cm

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Manière noire, générale et absolue (Black, General and Absolute Manner) draws on the artist’s own experience of navigating residency papers as a foreigner in France. The right to stay is something people born in the country take for granted. For foreigners, it is conditional. It is only granted after a long and uncertain process.

 

The installation combines a photograph taken in Montpellier during the suicide attempt of an undocumented Kurdish man, a mezzotint print, and a set of forged residency documents.

 

The names Virginie François and François Martin are invented identites. They were common French names in the 1970s. The faces are generated by artificial intelligence.

 

The work was shown in a kebab restaurant at Porte Saint-Denis, in Paris’s Kurdish neighbourhood. It brings together questions of visibility, identity, and the right to remain.