Lydia Ourahmane at Ordet

Artist: Lydia Ourahmane

Exhibition title: Polvere

Venue: Ordet, Milan, Italy

Date: July 7 – September 23, 2023

Photography: images courtesy of the artist and Ordet, Milan

With Polvere, Lydia Ourahmane reveals Ordet as a site of material production, as well as probing its spatial and physical potential. A wooden pathway, built with repurposed material, the residue of Ordet’s past programs, traverses the gallery. Matter never disappears: it moves, it mutates—mostly, it lingers. In a further act of disclosure, a section of the drywall that used to conceal the storage from the exhibition area now lays flat down on the floor. The exhibition mines and transforms all that Ordet has been and has made.

Just like it acknowledges the space in which it’s taking place, the exhibition only really reveals itself when a visitor moves within it.

It begins in another site of extraction, the source of much art-making for many centuries: a quarry in the area of the Apuan Alps first explored by Michelangelo, tasked to construct the facade of San Lorenzo in Florence. It remains unbuilt, survived by a wooden model and the debate for its completion. Invited to make an exhibition, Ourahmane proposed to source marble onsite, but in the absence of what had already been extracted, carved, sculpted, made accessible, and disseminated, the site presented itself as a cavity. Its deficit as its only remaining feature.

In echolocation, sound waves are emitted to understand space by assessing the contours of a clearing. A gunshot is the extremity of what can be deployed—and of what can be perceived. The echo is the aftermath of an impulse. In the quarry, the impulse employed was a blank pistol traditionally used to train dogs out of the fear of the sound. The shots are repeated until the dog is no longer distressed, and is able to obey beyond its instinct to run.

In Polvere, the echo is a measurement of human intervention. That recorded void now observes each individual visitor at Ordet, acutely foregrounding their participation as a live transmission. In the presence of visitors, the pathway triggers the impulse, the space accommodates the echo, and the echo plays the role of the witness.

The exhibition space appears altered, but nothing visible has been added, nothing has been removed, and nothing will be discarded. At the end of the show, the exposed drywall will be reduced to dust, its original material state, and recast in the interior of the pathway transforming its sections into sculptures, an index of all that was repurposed.

Lydia Ourahmane (b. 1992, Saïda, Algeria) is an artist based in Algiers and Barcelona. Ourahmane’s research-driven practice spans spirituality, contemporary geopolitics, migration, and the complex histories of colonialism. She incorporates video, sound, performance, sculpture, and installation on an often large or monumental scale that has consequences beyond the walls of her exhibitions. Drawing on personal and collective narratives and experiences, Ourahmane challenges broader institutional structures such as surveillance, logistics and bureaucratic processes, and the ways these forces are registered.

Recent solo exhibitions include: sync, KW Institute of Contemporary Art, Berlin; Vendesi, Progetto, Lecce; Tassili, SculptureCenter, New York, Mercer Union, Toronto, rhizome, Algiers, B7L9, Tunis and Louis Vuitton Foundation, Paris (2022-23); Survival in the afterlife, Portikus, Frankfurt and De Appel, Amsterdam (2021-22); Barzakh, Kunsthalle Basel, Triangle – Astérides, Marseille and S.M.A.K., Ghent (2021-2022); صرخة شمسية Solar Cry, CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco (2020); and The you in us, Chisenhale Gallery, London (2018), among others. Her work was included in the 34th Bienal de São Paulo (2021), Manifesta 12, Palermo (2018), the New Museum Triennial (2018) and the 15th Istanbul Biennial (2017). Selected group exhibitions include Risquons-Tout, WIELS, Brussels and Laws of Confusion, Renaissance Society, Chicago (both with Alex Ayed), Waiting for Omar Gatlato: A Survey of Algerian Contemporary Art, Le Magasin, Grenoble (2023). She will present a solo exhibition at MACBA, Barcelona (November 2023).

With special thanks to Henraux Spa, Querceta di Seravezza (LU); Daniel Blumberg and Billy Steiger.