ICI. / La-Bas

When Saadane Afif was awarded the prestigious Gunther-Peill Prize in 2012, he ended up in Duren, a small provincial town in North Rhine-Westphalia. He used this location as an opportunity to reflect on the idea of ‘Here’ (Ici)‘ and 'There’ (La-bas). Afif transported Duren’s station lights together with the loudspeakers and platform announcements into the museum setting. He invited friends to write songs on the themes of ‘Here’ and ‘There’ and designed two posters for Ici. and La-bas. - the titles of the two-part multimedia installation. Ici. was shown in the Leopold-Hoesch-Museum & Papiermuseum Duren and La-bas. at the 8th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art and in the Kunsthaus Glarus in Switzerland. The two-part artist book includes views of the installation, the fifteen lyrics by different poets, and essays by Diedrich Diedrichsen, Juan A. Gaitan, and Rein Wolfs on the French conceptual artist’s way of working.