In her artistic work, Ouassila Arras questions cultures of memory, biographies and narrative structures and illustrates accesses to and exclusions from society. To illustrate this, she symbolically uses natural materials that surround us in everyday life. In her exhibition UNDER LINE, she shows a floor installation that changes over the course of the exhibition, inspired on the one hand by the infrastructure in Berlin’s streets and on the other by her research in German and French school books used  for history lessons. In Berlin, the artist studied the floors in the urban space and discovered that in addition to asphalt and cobblestones, quadratic stone slabs are used on Berlin pavements, which, inconspicuous as they are, are hardly mentioned in the city’s events. In her exhibition, they become the main character. In the form of concrete casts, they are located in the centre of the room and encourage visitors to walk on them. They are covered with a surface of rust that, manipulated by the artist, shows different stages of transformation. In the course of the exhibition, the installation is largely fragmented by visitors walking on it.

Ouassila often works with everyday objects and natural materials that, due to their transformability, bring life into the exhibition space and can be read as a metaphor for biographies that gain little access to the Western and European canon or are largely silenced by the enormous pressure to integrate into societies. She is mainly concerned with the subliminal information that objects and metaphorically people carry with them and embody when they inhabit places. Ouassila traces the threads of fragmented life stories, especially of people whose voices are missing from textbooks and archives.

Ouassila Arras *1993 in France, lives and works in Reims. In 2018, she won the PRISME prize at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Reims. Her recent exhibitions include Plein jeu #2, Frac Champagne-Ardenne (2019), Des Histoires d’eau, CAC of Tanneries (2020), A Spoonful Of Sugar, Fiminco Foundation, Romainville (2020), BREEZE #3, GBagency Gallery, Paris (2021), Artpress Contemporary Art Biennial, MAMC, Saint-Étienne. Sheis co-founder of the artist-run space The Left Place – The Right Space, which opened in Reims in 2020. Ouassila Arras is participating in the residency programme AZ – ALLER & ZURÜCK, organised by the Goethe-Institut Nancy, the Goethe-Institut Strasbourg and the Bureau des arts plastiques of the Institut Français Germany. The programme is kindly supported by the Franco-German Youth Office (DJFW), the DRAC Grand Est and the Centre Français de Berlin.

The access to the exhibition is only granted for recovered, vaccinated and tested persons. A valid test or complete vaccination must be shown at the entrance. Recovered persons must present a positive PCR test result that is at least 28 days and no more than 6 months old. Thank you for your understanding.