Azize Ferizi at Cherish

Artist: Azize Ferizi

Exhibition title: SIS IS HARDCORE

Venue: Cherish, Petit-Lancy, Geneva, Switzerland

Date: September 9 – November 1, 2020

Photography: James Bantone / all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Cherish, Petit-Lancy

Azize Ferizi’s painting practice engages with issues of self-representation and heritage by depicting young women in the process of demanding and creating safe spaces. The works are interested in delineating the gaps between what is considered a home and what is in reality a safe space.

In many of these images, the young women dominate their architecture, often blending into landmass something more akin to becoming their own spatial safety nets and ultimate protectors. Her use of language and ubiquitous sayings (drawing from popular culture but specifically those of the modern self possessed and very online young woman) brazenly throw off the male gaze, rather, flipping it off from the backseat of their convertibles, hair in the wind, crescendoing in sparse overpowering gestures and brazen colors.

Taking it a step further, the young women overwhelm any potential threat with a self contained power, both in their positioning, the body contour, and their relationship to their immediate environment.

The artist prepared three new large scale works for the exhibition SIS IS HARDCORE at Cherish, pairing them with four older works that in many ways have become markers of ideas inherent to this build up in scale and magnitude, they make the works from earlier this year feel almost totemic, the subjects have come to disavow the need for location altogether in this next step while maintaining language and inertia of the previous meditations, as they emerge weightless from their frames and, given their scale, come to engage with the viewer head on.

These goddess-like figures are presented matter of factly, each sporting supernaturally accelerated attributes derived from the artist’s cultural background, serving as guides for her continued self-care in the face of developing and maintaining one’s practice as a young diasporic female artist.

Witchcraft, bitch craft
Light magic, it’s nothing
Don’t you fuck with my energy
Don’t you fuck with my energy

-Princess Nokia