Reiffers Art Initiatives - "Infiltrées, 5 manières d'habiter le monde" Prize exhibition 2023

The exhibition invites the five artists to take over the Acacias Art Center - whose new architecture will be revealed on this occasion - to display works that are almost entirely new. Artists who are not content to simply engage with the world, but who work just as hard to reconfigure it aesthetically and conceptually to propose other visions and other ways of making the world, together. At the end of the exhibition, one of them will be awarded the Reiffers Prize. With the support of Mazarine Group and La Mode en Images. 

The artist's works form abstract poems that tell of our relationship with our environment and our ability to make it our own, to reassemble it as much as to sublimate it. Represented by Galerie Balice Hertling, the artist is not content to simply grapple with the world, but works just as hard to reconfigure it aesthetically and conceptually, to propose other imaginaries and other ways of making the world, together. Voted for by the public and the Reiffers Art Initiatives artistic committee, the work of this young American artist living in Paris was singled out for its artistic approach and the sensitivity of its works, which faithfully reflect the tensions shaking today's society.

The exhibition featured works by five emerging women artists from four continents (Africa, America, Asia and Europe), selected by the artistic committee: Meriem Bennani, Han Bing, Binta Diaw, Bianca Bondi and Ser Serpas, the 2023 winner.

Daniel Buren’s ‘La Façade aux Acacias’ covers the entire façade with large isosceles triangles and zigzagging diagonals, creating a dynamic interplay between geometry, light, and the surrounding cityscape. Alongside this, he presents a second in situ work, ‘New Images of the Sky.’ Both works, created to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the mentorship program, transform the building into an artistic canvas and invite viewers to see urban space in a new way.

His large-scale immersive works place the body at the center, exploring its poetics through slowness, the decomposition of form, and the lens of the African diaspora. His extreme performances become sculptures and videos, creating ritual spaces where audiences experience emotions beyond language.

The image is their raw material, their playground for experimenting with new forms and imagining alternative types of narratives. Whether photographic or video-based, virtual or real, found on social media or created ex nihilo, this visual matter is transformed in their hands, hybridized and rearranged, unafraid to venture into the strange and uncanny to jolt us from our stupor in the face of the endless deluge of a thousand billion images that flood our daily lives.

Anhar Salem, on her part, embraces those images that show too much, omnipresent on social networks and in continuous flow. She questions their power in our societies, their influence on our lifestyles and collective imaginations. Finally, with Nanténé Traoré, the photographic print is transferred onto velvet, giving it a mysterious, shifting materiality. The image seems to vanish, to move toward abstraction. Could it be that the image is more powerful when it doesn’t show?

Born in 1993 in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, Anhar Salem lives and works between Jeddah and Paris. A self-taught artist, she first studied computer science at the Arab Open University in Jeddah before pursuing a postgraduate program at Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains in Tourcoing, France. Drawing on her personal experience with social media and the endless streams of images available online, Anhar Salem explores themes such as self-representation and the virtual extension of our lives on social networks.