1000 Villages

Exhibition from 2 December 2023 to 2 January 2024
Opening on 2 December at 1pm
82 Rue Didouche Mourad, Algiers-centre
Opening hours 11am - 6pm (Every day except Friday)

In 2021, curator and art historian Natasha Marie Llorens invited Selmani to work collaboratively on an evolution of a work he had presented at the Venice Biennial in 2015 entitled 1000 Villages. Selmani's point of departure for his original installation— the preparatory drawings for which are presented as part of
this exhibition—was an archive of press clippings about an urban planning project initiated by the Algerian government in the mid- 1970s under the aegis of the “Agrarian Revolution.” Its goal was
to redevelop the agricultural sector of Algeria's economy by collectivizing its infrastructure. Selmani was fascinated by how the 1000 socialist villages project transformed from myriad built forms into a sort of political rumor: people knew some villages had been established, but few had been to construction sites and even fewer knew why the project had been suspended.

Conversation MASSINISSA SELMANI & NATASHA MARIE LLORENS
Mon Autre École 02 December - 5.30pm

39 Rue Didouche Mourad, Algiers-centre

Installation view, "Ce qui demeure en nous", 2023, Galerie Rhizome