ART CITIES:Geneva -Sonia Kacem

The work of the Swiss-Tunisian artist Sonia Kacem is driven by the deeply intuitive and sensual relationship she has with her chosen materials. Her voluminous ephemeral site-specific compositions are the result of an array of spontaneous gestures, which use a kind of performative system attempting to merge the content and the container, the macro- and the microscopical.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève Archive

From her first exhibition Sonia Kacem is exploring the fundamental issues related to sculpture and more specifically those of the dematerialization and the decomposition of classical forms. For “Night Shift” at the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, was conceived during her four-month residency at the Centre, and reflects its own architectural format. The ephemeral and modular aspect of Sonia Kacem’s installation requires preliminary plastic research work, taking place in the studio. Sonia Kacem finds the basic elements of her work on the street or in memories and then engages in a play of the senses. She drapes both waste objects and newly produced elements and creates an instinctive dramaturgy between colours, forms, materials and their interplay. The artist accentuates the materiality of the objects through their juxtaposition and applies them to the space, whereby the context also has an influence. She wants to leave the associative connotation of the sculptural to viewers but does not shy away from her own recollections of images, which are at the beginning and end of her sketches. The artist does not want to charge the materials artificially and stipulate their meaning but rather to deliver a field of tension.

Info: Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, 10 rue des Vieux-Grenadiers, Geneva, Duration: 20/5-14/8/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-18:00, www.centre.ch