Soufiane Ababri (b. 1985, Rabat) lives and works between Tangier and Paris. He is known for his "bed works", works on paper made lying in a bed. In essence, he examines the ambivalence of a society that is crisscrossed by tensions that are not so much the reflection of its contradictions, but rather of its complementarity. His heritage lies in his own story, built up by layer upon layer of personal and intimate events.

The exhibition’s starting point is a public policy polling survey made in the United States in 2015 which found that 30% of Republicans and 19% of Democrats said they support ‘bombing Agrabah’ – the fictional nation of Disney’s Aladdin – the pool emphasis a whopping 41% of Donald Trump voters favor bombing Agrabah adding to the evidence indicating that his support is disproportionately drawn from the least knowledgeable parts of the electorate. This tragi-comic news suddenly reveals the strength of collective belief mechanisms and in this case raises the question of how exoticism influences the way the ‘exotic subject’ is perceived and how he is determined as other. Soufiane Ababri uses parodic tools to deconstruct the multiple layered construction of what exoticism should be in the eyes of a Western viewer. He will wander among Edward Said’s writings such as Orientalism published in 1978 and known as one of the most influential scholarly books of the 20th century. In that essay, Said examines Western scholarship of the “Orient,” specifically of the Arab Islamic world argues that early scholarship by Westerners in that region was biased and projected a false and stereotyped vision of “otherness” on the Islamic world that facilitated and supported Western colonial policy.