#Sound and chaos the story of bc studio series#
#Sound and chaos the story of bc studio tv#

It could be said that Ourahmane’s predilection for the ephemeral is an echo of her early years in clandestine contexts amid the scourge of civil war, when she was painfully aware that at any moment she might have to pack up, move on. For an exhibition at the Renaissance Society in Chicago this past winter, after several failed attempts to FedEx mud from the banks of the Nile-an act forbidden by Egyptian law-she and her occasional collaborator Alex Ayed ended up transporting bootleg bottles of river water, which evaporated over time. At the entrance to her 2018 show at London’s Chisenhale Gallery, Ourahmane treated two large silver doors with black sulfur, which rubbed away in dribs and drabs as grasping hands made contact each day. Often the work is haunted by its own imminent obsolescence Finitude, a wall made of ash and chalk crammed into a narrow alcove at the New Museum during its 2018 triennial, crumbled to dust over the course of the exhibition, a process hastened by periodic sonic vibrations. A typical Ourahmane exhibition is sparse, a psychic ecosystem characterized by the subtle deployment of light and sound, a smattering of talismanic objects that provide few clues as to their origins but end up being vehicles for smuggling in larger histories, many of them connected to Algeria’s colonial past and illiberal present. Photo: Philipp Hänger.Ī language of one’s own: That’s one way of evoking a multifarious art practice that eludes tidy summary. Lydia Ourahmane, 21 Boulevard Mustapha Benboulaid (details), 2021, mixed media. “At some point,” she says, “you start writing your own language.” “I had this feeling that I was always treading water, that I had to renegotiate the terms with every move.” Her fictitious pop stardom was an act of self-fashioning. “I was never able to connect my own experience to anyone else’s,” she says. Nothing about this decidedly unusual childhood prepared Ourahmane for life at an English middle school.

#Sound and chaos the story of bc studio tv#

Communal spaces served as rudimentary sets for underground Christian TV and radio broadcasts and ad hoc puppet shows based on Bible tales. She got used to living alongside perfect strangers.

#Sound and chaos the story of bc studio series#

Born in 1992, near the beginning of her country’s decade-long civil war-a conflict that pitted an authoritarian military government against Islamist guerrillas-Ourahmane spent her childhood in a series of safe houses that her parents, members of Algeria’s persecuted Christian minority, founded and ran. Ourahmane was nine years old when her family emigrated from Oran, a gloriously decaying Algerian port city wholly obscure to her British peers. To be clear, the pop-star story is apocryphal. She does not regret her decision, back in the day, to inform her classmates at her new school in London that she’d had a previous life as a child pop star. She has a keen interest in glossolalia, the ecstatic experience of speaking in tongues, though she has not, as yet, had the pleasure. Ourahmane, who frequently speaks of “energies,” has had a facsimile of an ancient warrior girl tattooed on one arm and a gold tooth permanently drilled into her mouth. The evangelical Christian movement in 1980s Algeria began with an injured football player’s miraculous healing. Psychogeography (the term for a signature concept popularized by the Situationists in 1950s Paris) was actually the coinage of an illiterate man from the Kabyle region of Algeria. Here are some things I learned over the course of our phone calls, paraphrased from my scribbled notes. The vibe was both history lesson and séance, a seamless braiding of personal history and politics. Our wide-ranging conversations began in the pandemic’s second year, and before long I had grown accustomed to the artist’s elliptical, zigzag patter. I’d seen images of her work, too-invitingly minimalist installations perfumed by mystery, chaos, and accident. I HAD HEARD about Lydia Ourahmane long before setting out to write about her curiously affecting art, had heard about her improbable backstory as the child of an Algerian father and a Malaysian Chinese mother who had fallen in love at a school for evangelical Christians in the UK. Lydia Ourahmane, Finitude, 2018, ash, chalk, steel, inductor base stereo system.