A storyteller tasked with passing on oral folklore instead narrates the plot of a classic Bollywood film. A lion’s head hanging on the wall as a hunter’s trophy turns out to be papier-mâché. The ceramic sculptures in the shape of birds, arranged on plinths, are in fact musical instruments intended to be played by a class of young flautists. Things are rarely what they seem in Katia Kameli’s work. Organized by Bétonsalon and the Institute of Islamic Cultures (ICI), the recent mid-career survey of the Franco-Algerian artist, “Yesterday comes back and I hear it(Yesterday is Returning and I Can Hear It) filled the gallery spaces of four floors and three different locations. It covered twenty years of work. And yet, it was Kameli’s first solo exhibition in his own hometown.
Named for a line in the collection of stories Women of Algiers in their apartment (Women of Algiers in Their Apartment, 1980), by feminist writer and filmmaker Assia Djebar – who, of course, reverted to her title as Eugène Delacroix in a provocative act of cultural reappropriation of an unreconstructed Orientalist –”Yesterday comes back and I hear it” traced both the evolution of Kameli’s practice and the consistency of his preoccupation with secret stories, buried truths, and subjects so disturbed they become taboo. In Bledi, a possible scenario, 2004, she mixes digital video and Super 8 to reconstitute an experimental collage-type film. Organized around a busy soundtrack, Bledi features interview footage with young people who laugh at the differences between themselves and their parents. This subtly opens up the subject of Algeria’s undeclared civil war, known as the Black Decade, which had ended a few years earlier. In the movie The narrator2012, a man named Abderahim Al Azalia, a central figure in the storytelling circles of Marrakech, reconstructs his material with synopses of popular films, while two very different cultural phenomena are superimposed in real time.
Addressing anxieties of influence across ancient empires, this iteration of Kameli’s ongoing series, 2015’s “Stream of Stories,” included paper animals, illuminated manuscripts, and several films about the betrayal of translation. Here the display resulted in Story Stream Chapter 7, 2022, a tufted woolen tapestry hangs from the ceiling of the Great Hall of the ICI location on Stephenson Street. Made in collaboration with the artist and weaver Manon Daviet, the tapestry, subtitled The dove with the collar, the gazelle, the crow, the rat and the tortoisereproduces images from six different manuscripts of the Sanskrit stories Panchatantra and their Arabic, Persian and Turkish equivalents, Kalila wa Dimnaillustrating the common genealogy of these sources and engaging the entire body of Arabic and Asian literature that made French classics like Jean de La Fontaine Fables possible. The Song of the Birds2022, resumes the Sufi epic of Farid ud-Din Attar The Bird Conference, California. 1177, on the desires and movements of the soul. Kameli responds to the text with an outpouring of watercolors, painted fabrics, bird-shaped clay flutes, and a film featuring seven young women playing these instruments as they drift ethereal through the empty streets of Paris toward a resolutely 21st century. community garden.
Arguably Kameli’s most ambitious work to date, The Algerian novel (Le roman algérien), 2016–, filled Bétonsalon’s ground floor exhibition space with prints, sculptures, a hand-stitched Algerian flag, archival documents and a curtained projection area showing the first three videos of the series on a loop. In the first, the artist visits a makeshift photo kiosk in central Algiers, where old photographs, postcards and political posters are pinned to the bars above the windows of a bank. Off-screen, she asks various people, including feminist writer Wassyla Tamzali and former resistance fighter Louisette Ighilahriuz, to comment on the images put up for sale. For the second segment, Kameli calls on the art historian and philosopher Marie-José Mondzain to respond to the images of the interview. In the third video, Mondzain meets with photojournalist Louiza Ammi to discuss her own archive of images from the Algerian Civil War. Seemingly simple questions about what these images show and who they are for lead us to deeper inquiries into the unfinished business of decolonization. As the series progresses from film to film, and from onscreen interviews to objects in the exhibition space, Kameli clings to Djebar to guide her through the troubled waters of an unstable story. It’s a wonderful tribute to the writer’s enduring themes. But it’s Kameli who does the job.
