A7EBAK COME BACK

Réda Boussella (born in 1994, lives and works in Aubervilliers) explores a colorful and pop-art sculptural, pictorial and performative practice in which hierarchies are joyfully blurred. Intentionally sensitive, this willful overlapping allows him to bring out the artistic and political stakes that shape our daily lives.

During his seven-month residency at La Galerie, centre d’art contemporain, Réda Boussella developed a project entitled A7EBAK COME BACK [I love you Come back], based around the subject of the journey to the bled, a summer trek that he himself experienced in his youth. At Noisy-le-Sec, he met groups of residents to exchange with them around their personal and family stories, thus opening a space that lent itself to elaboration and to the drafting of an alternative memoir. This text describes both the material conditions of the journey (mode of transportation, length, luggage and gifts brought) and the feeling of exile and the intimate ties nourished with the family members who remained in the native land.

Based on these narratives, Réda Boussella conceived of a moveable parade titled Gomme Arabique, which symbolically replays the journey to the bled—a piece that lies between individual or collective memory and fantasy. The elements, made by the artist, that make up the exhibition—sets, costumes and other scenographic objects—come to life in a manner simultaneously burlesque, poetic and political on the occasion of performances by an amateur troupe of actors and musicans from Noisy-le-Sec.

This exhibition follows Réda Boussella’s residency from September 2023 to March 2024.