Selma Feriani Gallery is proud to announce a solo exhibition by contemporary Tunisian artist Nicene Kossentini. Curated by French philosopher Christine Buci- Glucksmann, the exhibition revolves around a new body of works made for The flight of the butterfly or the myth of Icarus revisited.
“And for me too, I who cherish life, butterflies… and anything resembling them among people, seems to know happiness“. It is in such terms that Nietzsche, a great lover of all lightness and free psyche, describes the butterfly’s happiness: life. And it’s that dream of flying and crossing the whole space with a heavy risk of fall and death, that Nicene Kossetini is exploring in her exhibition called: “The flight of the butterfly or the myth of Icarus revisited“. For, this so fragile white butterfly is that of an encounter. He enters the loggia, settles down, by flapping his wings here and there. She gazes at it for long. Then one day it disappears and she finds it dead on the ground, the wings folded down. Sign of thought and image, that butterfly has become an art allegory or in the Walter Benjamin’s words “a frozen shake“. And as well as Baudelaire made beauty an allegory of a “stone dream“, one could say that all this poetry of ephemera built with various medias (photography, film and sculpture) makes beauty as a dream of light, such as a new Icarus. Therefore reinterpreting the flight of the butterfly is finding his legendary strength and what underlies it: a story of the gaze. Look up, look from above and across, or look dipping down: three kinds of looks that can be called «Icarian eye» are running throughout the Nicene Kossentini’s whole work. Unlike the Renaissance perspective eye centred on the horizon bar, the Icarian eye caught in infinity is horizonless or rather in a quivering and elusive horizon. Looking for a floating or lacking horizon, Nicene Kossentini is making the sky a “matrix“ between reality and fiction.”
Christine Buci-Glucksmann
