Hobb - Algerian Artist Zoulikha Bouabdellah

Love is a desire almost as constant as the need to speak about it. For centuries, the Arabic language has forged a vocabulary specifically to describe the diversity of love. The language of eroticism was celebrated in ancient texts as the ideal way to have a liberated body, sensuality and pleasure. However, the end of this golden age gave way to a schizophrenic use of Arabic. Limited, circumscribed and moralized, it has now become, writes the Syrian poet Salwa Al Neimi, the “tomb of the loving feeling.”

LOVE is developed as a mechanical wall installation with the word itself repeated as an instinctive and spontaneous response to this quasi censorship. The variation around the single word “love” in this work demonstrates how it has come to mean beauty, body, sex, sexual pleasure and forbidden and dissatisfying love. - ZB