Catalogue > At random

The Chouas #Episode5 Am I the only one who is like me? (’45) The Chouas started from an old photograph of Saddie Choua’s father and his four brothers. Three of them emigrated to Belgium. One turned back. Two stayed in Morocco. Who made the best choice? The Chouas are an ongoing lifework in episodes, an artwork in which the alienation of the immigrant families in Europe, the self-portraits in the Diaspora, the specters of the homeland are explored in multiple narrative threads and media. It will e.g. refer to soap series and other popular formats and will invite the viewer to discover the structures of stereotypical image-formation, dominant codes and partial histories. Am I The Only One Who Is Like Me? is the fifth episode of The Chouas, through which Saddie Choua depicts her own family, expertly mixing autobiography with fiction and personal and political considerations. With this fifth episode, made up of archive images, film extracts and television sequences, the artist prolongs her interrogation of self, hierarchical systems, the desire to dominate, and power games. Saddie Choua connects her Belgian grandfather with The Bluest Eye, a novel by Toni Morrison. The video reflects her political criticism of inequality. That inequality is rooted in our culture and our economics, whether it is about the situation in a Citroën factory or in the arts. We are governed by people who do not love us. Audre Lorde has said that anger is a force and from it can be drawn knowledge. It is not this anger that disrupts collaboration between ethnicities, between genders, between social classes but rather the refusal to listen to it. Saddie Choua translates this anger into a visual format.

Am I the only one who is like me? This is a question characteristic of Saddie Choua’s life and work. It problematizes the position of the solitary I that is also never disconnected from the other. The power order that conditions the solitary “I”, is another central subject.  Where does this otherness sit in the hierarchy of power? Where is her oppression and exploitation concealed or exoticed? Saddie Choua asks us to think about how we consume images and dialogues about the other and how they affect our self-image and historical consciousness. How can we intervene in the images that write our history and conceal social struggle? She uses meta-documentary tactics, collage, own (material, re-appropriation of popular intercultural formats and autiobiographical elements to put racism, discrimination against women and class and her cats in the spotlight. It is her way of undermining the (visual) language of our media and sharpening the critical and political gaze of her audience. Saddie Choua's work questions the relationship between maker and image. “How to speak and depict differently from a subalternal position, or is it just the concept of ‘the other’ that confines me in dominant images and narratives?” Saddie Choua lives and works in Brussels, Ostend and Lychnaftia. She is a doctoral researcher at RITCS Brussels and a lecturer at Sint Lucas Antwerp and RITCS. She is part of the artist collective ROBIN. She is one of the laureates of the Belgian Art Prize 2020 that was cancelled by the organization because the artists asked to go in dialogue concerning the ethics of the prize.