Finding history in the trash
In this exhibition, Ali Arkady transcends the boundaries between artistic mediums, combining video and photography with unexpected and mixed techniques. The scenography opens a way through these mediums. This path connects the different artistic practices that define Ali Arkady's work, always in this dynamic of superimposition. It’s also a path through time, it guides us chronologically through the memories and emotions of Ali Arkady. It’s an aesthetic path that makes space composed as a narrative.
A few months ago, Ali Arkady discovered some monoliths stones, about a hundred years old, that the Beaux-Arts were planning to throw away. He was overwhelmed by these stones, the ages they had passed, the importance of their stories, all the culture and tradition they symbolize. At the group exhibition of the Mesiti workshop to which he is attached, he exposed the stones for the first time and showed his videos, having overlaid the stones and spread them throughout the gallery. After this first stage of deconstructing the classical use of a stone, he combines this discovery with another one: lithography. Invented by Aloys Senefelder, from 1796, in Germany, but definitively developed in the first years of the 19th century, lithography (from the Greek lithos, "stone" and graphein, "to write") is a printing technique that allows the creation and reproduction in multiple copies of a line executed with ink or pencil on a limestone. This technique reminds Ali Arkady of the printing of old newspapers and links his works to his background as a journalist.