The exhibition I See a Bird / Je vois un oiseau is the scene of multiple narratives, a succession of “drawn voyages,” where changing landscapes, real or fictional, blend into each other. Connected in a fluid and borderless environment, birds are our guides here. Free and autonomous, they embody the problems of lines, trajectories, energy (“creative wings”), the ways of the world, and landscapes, which all permeate the work of Chourouk Hriech. Taking inspiration from the behavior of migratory birds, the artist explores them as witnesses to our own relationship with the environment, and as indicators of the ecological crisis, especially the extinction of certain species.

For the Drawing Lab, Chourouk Hriech unfurls a metaphorical locality that links Bangkok to Casablanca and Tokyo to Marseille, a city-world whose main inhabitants are birds. The artist's kaleidoscopic images mix and collide in the exhibition space that is entirely taken over by black-and-white drawings on paper of various sizes as well as on an entire wall, and in immersive installations and videos. This abundant path encourages reverie and exploration, as well as a bodily and intellectual experience of the venue’s physical space, transformed into a "new environment". The animal, including human, and plant kingdoms meld into strata of cities and nature.

Thought as an echo to the dramas happening in skies, forests, swamps and ponds, on grasslands, and in cities, this exhibition invites visitors to walk through life-size fables made of combined and co-existing forms, cultures, and periods, that yet remain engaged with reality.

Jerome Sans
Curator of the exhibition