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Fellow
2022 - 2023
Photography
Yasmina Benabderrahmane graduated from the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Paris in 2009 and from Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains de Tourcoing in 2015. She works experimentally with film and silver photography. Her instinctive artistic practice lies halfway between documentary and filmed diary, and mainly takes the form of multimedia installations. She collects and probes the visible world and the people she loves and who surround her. Her work has been shown in numerous international exhibitions and is part of both private and public collections. In 2018, she received the Solveig-Anspach Prize and was named Révélation Photographie – Laureate of the Prix LE BAL de la Jeune Création 2019 with ADAGP.
In 2021, she won the national photographic commission “Regards du Grand Paris – Année 6” (CNAP – Ateliers Médicis).
Her research project is based on the discovery a few years ago, with her aunt, of a thirty-year archive of slide photographs donated by Dominican nuns. She learned that they were to be expelled from their convent in Paris. That nuns in the Vatican are protesting against their working conditions. That some of them are even converting to “hospitalier” status and becoming socially involved. A 9th-century legend has it that Pope Joan became papal nun by pretending to be a man, and that her imposture was revealed when she gave birth in public during her sacrament. For Yasmina Benabderrahmane, behind all this lies the idea that a woman is worth less than a man, that a priest is everything, a nun nothing. She sees cross-dressing first and foremost as an attempt to transgress gender and imposed order. These questions of masquerade and revelation lead her to reflect on the tradition of carnival as a means of accessing the divine. To realize her residency project “CARNE VALE, lotta lavora come un fascista”, she will follow a community to better reveal minorities, and will seek to unveil the light of carnival.