Exhibition. Oussama Tabti

From 28 April to 18 September 2022 at the Centrale for contemporary art (Centrale Box).

Oussama Tabti presents the exhibition Alien. His work questions hermetic geopolitics, made up of impassable borders and enclosed cults.

'Algerian Man' photo

A small island in New York Bay, Ellis Island was the busiest immigrant inspection station in the United States in the first part of the 20th century. Augustus Frederick Sherman was an employee in the Ellis Island Immigration Office. One of his duties was to photograph immigrants as they arrived on the island. This is how the image of a man who came from Algeria in 1905 was captured. It was simply listed as the Algerian Man.

Oussama Tabti

In 2018, Oussama Tabti investigates the life of this character and his intriguing portrait. However, the artist finds himself confronted with a harsh administrative reality and, ironically, he never gets a response to his visa application. By linking his own experience to that of this immigrant from the beginning of the 20th century, the artist questions our mobility in a global world. A world divided between openness to diversity and narrow parochialism.