Félixe T. Kazi-Tani and Sido Lansari

RAW

Curated by Bernardo Follini

Opening: May 6 2023 5 – 8 pm

May 7 – July 23 2023

Palazzo Re Rebaudengo, Piazza Roma, 1 – 12050, Guarene (CN)

On the occasion of the eleventh year of collaboration with ENSBA Lyon – École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo hosts the duo exhibition “RAW”, the first presentation in Italy of Félixe T. Kazi-Tani and Sido Lansari, artists participating in the 2023 edition of the Post-diplôme. The Post-diplôme is a post-graduate research program for the arts organized by the French school, coordinated by the curator Oulimata Gueye, and open every year to five artists.

“RAW” exhibits new productions by the artists, conceived and realized specifically for the spaces of Palazzo Re Rebaudengo in Guarene. At the center of the dialogue lies an exploration of the relationship between body, food and sexuality. Over the past decades, food culture and animal consumption have been investigated extensively from philosophical and activist perspectives, allowing the connections between human and animal oppressive systems to be delineated. Since the publication in 1990 of Carol J. Adams’ classic The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory, the international debate has focused on the power relations that animate the field of cooking and the practice of meat consumption as a rite of production of virility. Placing itself within this critical tradition, “RAW” attempts to answer the question: “When does a body become meat?”.

“RAW” explores the relationship between food and erotic consumption, confronting the processes of sexualization of animal food and animalization of bodies in the sphere of sexuality, highlighting their intersections based on the categories of gender, class and race. The artists are united by a practice of exploring archives in an attempt to recompose historical dynamics of oppression and collective strategies of autonomy.

Félixe T. Kazi-Tani investigates culinary culture through their transfeminist perspective as a codified performative system, in which social control guaranteed by the etiquette coincides with patriarchal and heteronormative domination. Feeding their research through a baker practice and an extensive bibliography of cooking books and pamphlets from the last two centuries, the artist is interested in staging how food and culinary practices are traversed as much by ethics of care as by hegemonic violence.

Sido Lansari employs the practice of embroidery to stitch together events related to the sexuality of queer Arab communities in France. Dwelling on the language contained within magazines from the 1980s devoted to sexual advertisements, Lansari explores the fetishization of Arab bodies and processes of racialization in the field of sexuality.

The title of the exhibition “RAW” (“raw”) refers on the one hand to raw meat as a symbolic referent of male dominance, and on the other hand it is inspired by the film of the same name by French director Julia Ducournau (Raw – A Raw Truth), a disturbing horror film focusing on the relationship between sexuality and cannibalism.