Untitled (KANAL)

At the same time as it reveals the conditioned reflexes engendered by life in society, Younes Baba-Ali’s work highlights its shortfalls, not without irony. Using technology, objects, sound, video, and photography to great effect, he frequently exhibits in public spaces or in unusual areas. His work is always context-specific and only truly takes shape when in dialogue with the public. This way, he portrays the public as his accomplice in his guerrilla installation art that pits the establishment against the person in the street.

In the lockers of the former Citroën garage, Younes Baba-Ali brings to life the workers’ lockers, witnesses to the collective history of the location and tools of metamorphosis - from the individual to the worker and vice versa - and gives them their own existence. Everything appears abandoned until the doors, driven by small motors, begin to open and close randomly and eerily, at times very gently, at other times with a violent grinding and squeaking. The installation also mixes the past of the building with its future, in so much as it suggests, through banging doors and metallic clattering, its transformation into a museum.