Sonia Kacem

My practice is concerned with material, gravity, surface, spatial gesture, motion, and temporality, with colour and composition key to each in situ ephemeral and/or modular sculpture and installation.The works revisit and redefine the formal and narrative scope of abstraction, taking the physical as a source of potential at different stages of the process, be it online, in secondhand stores or in workshops. Dust, fabric, models, toys, junk, images, stories, and more are manipulated and deployed as shapes motivated by my observations and sensiti- vity to experience.These reflections inform expansive installations that confront the disorder of the sculptural arrangement within the built environment.The resulting opaque exchange between object and viewer in the experiential environment produced by the work seeks to encourage an intuitive interaction with form and material. Between surface and volume, artwork and architecture, my work is a scenography in which the body wanders through fiction while remaining abstract. In toying with popular exotic or orientalist representation, I ask how else we might handle difference, the unknown, the mixity.The titles give the pieces characters that perform in the exhibition – a personification that gradually introduces elements that have led to my investigation of the social norms that constrain public and private bodies.

Sonia Kacem (*1985 in Geneva, Switzerland) is a Swiss-Tunisian artist based in Amsterdam. She completed her art studies at HEAD (Haute Ecole d’Art et de Design, Genève). Kacem’s artistic practice can be characterized as large scale sculptures/installations in situ, ephemeral or permanent, redefining abstraction, formally and narratively. Kacem’s work has been awarded by the Swiss Art Awards (2013) and Premio Artsiti per Frescobaldi (2018). She took part to residency programs, at Rijksakademie van beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam (2016-2017) and lately The Townhouse Gallery in Cairo (2019). Exhibited internationally since 2011, her latest exhibitions were in Tilburg “Delirious” for Lustwarande, ”Between the Scenes”, at Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster and ‘Figures on the ground’ at Fondation CAB, Brussels.