Neïl Beloufa: Call and Response
François Ghebaly is proud to present Call and Response, Neïl Beloufa’s sixth exhibition at the gallery.
Call and Response considers a handful of ideas: enduring effects of cyclical media feeds that careen between brutality and hyper-individualism; and iterative or seemingly infinitely reduplicated scenarios in war, art, and advertisement.
The exhibition is organized around two adjacent installations. The main gallery features a new multimedia installation of the same title, which comprises six lightboxes made from pigmented resin, MDF, and LEDs, materials not unlike those in our handheld and laptop technologies. The different images in each lightbox, ”beach,” “flowers,” and “portrait,” for example, are deliberately placeholding or picturesque. Additional layers of multicolored resin further obscure the underlying images, causing them to resemble, as Beloufa says, “something you’ve scrolled past.” Installed in the exhibition space is an ad hoc karaoke station that cycles between loops with different lyrics and narrative content pertaining to the lightbox images, voices claim, parrot, distort, and refute, though the images themselves remain unchanged. The karaoke song continues to play whether or not the viewer participates.
The adjoining gallery features video and sculptural artworks from Beloufa’s 2019 installation Global Agreement. In each work, vertical monitors display anonymized conversations that Beloufa has conducted with real soldiers from around the world. Speaking through their phone cameras, the soldiers talk about why they joined their respective armies, what they do there, and their outlook. Beloufa found the interviewees on social media and recorded their conversations over Skype, later removing his interviewing questions so that the soldiers appear in direct dialogue or confessional with the viewer. In order to watch the videos, the viewer must sit atop a double-sided bench whose design loosely resembles gym equipment, medical technology, or some other kind of institutional “training” device. Here, the viewer listens as the soldiers discuss their fears, beliefs, and boredoms.
“The gap between the two works is the weird disconnected feeling I feel,” Beloufa observes. In one installation, real people inside real power structures talk into their screens. In the other, images glow and change meaning depending on the voice or circumstance overlaid.
Neïl Beloufa is a French-Algerian filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist. His multifaceted practice addresses themes of geopolitics, technology, and ideology through layered projects that combine video, sculpture, social participation, and often dynamic processes like sensor activation or algorithmic control. Blending electrical and technical materials in circuitous, uncanny arrangements, the artist levies his systems to interrogate social atomization and contemporary power structures in the age of information.
Neïl Beloufa (b. 1985, Paris, France) studied at École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts and at École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, Paris; California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, USA; Cooper Union, New York; and Le Fresnoy National Contemporary Arts Studio, Tourcoing, France. He has exhibited in numerous solo exhibitions worldwide, including at Kunsthalle Basel; Renaissance Society, Chicago; Secession, Vienna; Pirelli Hangar Bicocca, Milan; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Schirn Künsthalle, Frankfurt; Pejman Foundation, Tehran; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Schinkel Pavilion, Berlin; and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. He participated in the Venice Biennale in 2013 and 2019, the Shanghai Biennale and Taipei Biennale in 2014, and the Lyon Biennale of Contemporary Art in 2013. His work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; François Pinault Collection; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Stoschek Collection, Düsseldorf, among others. He lives and works in Paris.
