The series Family Friendly consists of censored images taken from art magazines found in Dubai. In the UAE, as in many Muslim countries, images of nudity are prohibited in the public sphere. Images that include nudity are hidden beneath hand-made ink marks. Each image, in turn, becomes unique. For this project, Fayçal Baghriche has extracted an identical image from different copies of the same magazine to produce a diptych that shows the action of the hand on the magazine. Baghriche is interested here in the aesthetic value of these new objects, which are effectively artworks made by people who are not artists.

This work, we should note, is not therefore a critique of censorship per se. Baghriche shares a Muslim cultural education with the citizens of the UAE, but grew up in Europe where the relationship to the body is completely different. As an artist, but also as a collector, Bagriche is interested in the aesthetic and social value of these hybrid images. For him, they are documents that allow us to question how a society with its own specific set of values finds a way to be open to western culture in a way that is coherent with these values.

Alexandra MacGilp

Fayçal Baghriche

Family Friendly series, 2012

Produced during a residency in A.i.R Dubai

Courtesy of the artist

Fayçal Baghriche's work, Souvenir (2013), is part of the Kamel Lazaar Foundation Collection. View the work here.