2015 - 2017

Following Denial, this action displaces the artistic response outside the object and outside the explicit field of art. In the aftermath of the January 2015 attacks in Paris and the intensification of the conflation of “Arab,” “Muslim,” and “terrorist” in public discourse, I decided to grow a beard so that public space would contain one more “Arab,” that is to say, one more body made available to a racialized reading.

It was neither a role, nor a disguise, nor even a performance in the usual sense of the term, since the action unfolded entirely outside the institutional framework of art, without stage, without audience, without an explicitly performative context. It was not received as a work within the social field in which it operated, and the photographs that remain are merely simple documentation, fragments of everyday life, without any particular aesthetic intention. What mattered was not their visual quality, but the process they recorded: a minimal modification of appearance intended to activate, at the most ordinary level of social perception, the mechanisms of assignation through which a body becomes immediately legible as suspect. It was therefore less a performance than a presence strategically exposed to the ordinary economy of suspicion.

Where Denial worked on the ideological density of a slogan, One More Arab shifted the same inquiry toward the body itself, toward silent assignation. It was no longer a matter of exposing the discursive production of conflation, but of placing myself within the very field in which that conflation takes effect. Where Denial responded to the slogan “Je suis Charlie” by saturating it until it turned back against itself, this action extended the same gesture into public space, onto the body itself, in its most banal everydayness. The project thus engages a politics of visibility: not to produce a spectacular image, but to insert a body into a regime of perception already saturated with colonial and postcolonial codes.

In this sense, it was not a matter of “becoming Arab” — although I am — but of making perceptible the violence of racial assignation itself. The project takes as its material that unstable threshold where a body is read before being known, classified before speaking. It seeks neither event, nor stage, nor spectacular effect. It consists in revealing the speed with which public space produces its figures of alterity, and the ease with which a face, a beard, or an appearance can become the support for political projection.