Yasmina Benabderrahmane

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 with film and silver photography in an experimental way.

Her instinctive artistic practice lies halfway between documentary and film 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 exhibited in numerous international exhibitions and is included in both private and public collections. In 2018 she received the Solveig-Anspach Prize and was awarded the Revelation in Photography – Laureate of the LE BAL Prize for Young Creation 2019 with the ADAGP.
In 2021 she won the national photographic commission “Regards du Grand Paris – Year 6” (CNAP – Workshops Medicis).

Her research project is based on a discovery with her aunt, a few years ago, of a thirty-year archive of slide photographs donated by Dominican nuns. She learnt that they will be forced out of their convent in Paris. And also that the nuns in the Vatican are protesting against their working conditions. That there are even some who have become “hospitalists” and are socially committed. A ninth-century legend tells us that the popess Joan became a papal nun by pretending to be a man, and that her pretence was revealed when she gave birth in public during her sacrament.

For Yasmina Benabderrahmane, behind all of this lies the idea that a woman is worth less than a man, that a priest is everything, and a nun nothing. She perceives transvestism primarily as an attempt to transgress gender and the imposed order. These questions of masquerade and revelation lead her to reflect on the carnival tradition in the access to the divine. To carry out the residency project “CARNE VALE, lotta lavora come un fascista”, she will follow a community to better uncover minorities, and will seek to unveil the light.

 

© Daniele Molajoli