Khadija El Abyad

“With the intention of containing our being in this frail envelope that keeps us in a differentiation unbearable to live, Freud said that our body is our destiny. In fact, this body that we transport in accordance with our existential peregrinations is some kind of a magnet that attracts to it all the paradoxical moments of life … It bears words and woes, dreams and fantasies, narratives and images… as if to mark this fatal identity, crossed by the unsustainable labyrinths of meaning.”

Khadija El Abyad, transforms the body into a mirror of her existence. She reads it and rereads it, deciphers it like a talisman and remodels it like a game that she keeps reformulating. A piercing look watches over her interrogations, a tireless quest subsumes her artistic research and will to relate, to narrate the ineffable subterranean story that convulses her being and senses.

Khadija plunges into the meanders of her being. A skin-self that she revisits in a search of reminiscences. The effervescent memory that she translates into images is a broken mirror. She picks up its broken pieces and spreads them over her face. A face that she recomposes in accordance with her wounds, maybe in order to heal them, to think them, and to exorcise them. The face becomes an extended metaphor, a composite image, a territory of all names and stories. Khadija interprets it, rereads it, disfigures and transfigures it to reveal the real and imaginary geography of its figurality.

As the face is the identity image of the body, it is transmuted into an archipelago of meaning. It is a fragmentary sign of a plurality of significations that the artist transforms into an internal landscape. The latter reveals all the traces displayed on it: traces that write down the depth of pain, invoke the manifestations of suffering and express the story of a struggle with oneself, against oneself, on what is happening within the frames of a being to be tamed!

The body is there as a space for contact with the world. It speaks the world. It reflects it and interiorizes it. The body is a transcribed narrative of a personal history. Its skin is a parchment on which are traced the fragmentary narratives of a silenced word, barely pronounced, or whispered in the ear! In order to discover the mazes of such an unspeakable story, Khadija reinvents her body through skin manipulation. She recreates it through another skin generally dedicated to embrace her femininity.

Also, the use of thin tights is a point where femininity and sacredness come together. She doubles the body and transforms it into a “moi-peau” (Didier Anzieu). In order to escape the “horrors” – limits of body art, Khadija puts to the test the metaphor of her body as an envelope, as a surface. Thin thighs are a sham of the skin; they undergo what the skin can undergo by embracing the shape of the body. The glass debris (from this mirror of the self) transpierce the skin, and blood sheds in front of our eyes. This scene invokes pain as a mental imagery and a figure of a theatricality where suffering is experienced through a suggested pain, a pain that is to happen!”