Changing Track

P21 Gallery is proud to present Changing Track, a group exhibition presenting works by Samir Laghouati-Rashwan, Randa Maroufi, Rayane Mcirdi, Valentin Noujaïm and Sara Ouhaddou. Exploring the notions of daydream, change and im/mobility, the show features video and stained glass works, two mediums that function through an interplay between light and surface; traversing, transformed, absorbed or bouncing back, the rays draw straight or deviated trajectories. Dealing with the construction of self, contemporary social realities, and the intertwining of history, the works on display offer singular perspectives on the unexpected connections between hindrance and movement, constraint and transformation, preservation and vanishing lines – connections that elaborate the layering of spaces in time, and of time in space. In La Modification (1957) – in English, Changing Track – Michel Butor tells the story of a character whose plans change as he travels by train from Paris to Rome. The novel shows how the process of moving through space and time alters the character’s thoughts, perceptions and perspectives. An investigation in itself, the narrative line intertwines several scales: memories and projections, impressions of a landscape unfolding through the window, assumptions about fellow travelers, observations of repetitive patterns. A chronotope, La Modification allows us to think of time’s greatest contradiction – as marked both by the linear succession of past, present and future, and by their simultaneous production through memory, consciousness and anticipation. Perhaps this is why the notion of ‘circulation’ designates as much the gesture of going from one point to another, as a movement that folds back on its point of departure. Using Butor’s novel as a conceptual backbone rather than a thematic inspiration, Changing Track seeks to bring together a variety of contemporary approaches. Some artists are interested in the histories of artifacts, goods, and practices that have passed (and transformed) through different contexts: Sara Ouhaddou’s stained glass work Al Kalima shows how total transformation is the byproduct of a slow gradation proceeding throughout a series of close (or infinitesimally different) states; Samir Laghouati-Raswhan’s film Quinquina Diaspora seeks to strip the historical gaze of its anthropomorphic filter to better reveal the memorial load of objects, thus linking materiality and immateriality. Other works question what defines and expresses a given space. It can be de jure an enclave, as in Bab Sebta by Randa Maroufi, where the characters evolve by the quasi-choreographed operation of a movement whose loops seem to draw the fence. It can be an unsuspected place, swallowed up in time and space (that of the undergrounds of La Défense), but whose ghost returns to haunt today’s area, via a testimonial voice, in Défense : Volume 1 by Valentin Noujaïm. Or it can be, in Le Croissant de feu by Rayane Mcirdi, a space that has lost its emblem (is it crown or fetters, a sign of anchorage or blockage?) and is superimposed by a space to dream, itself blending possible elsewheres; a spatiotemporal stack drawing an interzone where desire for freedom and reality check lightly brush.