Family friendly

The series Family Friendly consists of a collection of diptyques of covered-over images taken from art magazines found in Dubai.
In the UAE, like in many Muslim countries images of nudity are prohibited in the public sphere. Images that include nudity are hidden underneath hand-made ink marks. Each image becomes unique. Baghriche has extracted an identical image from different copies of the same magazine to produce a diptyque that shows the action of the hand on the magazine. Baghriche is interested by the aesthetic value of these new objects, artworks made by people who are not artists. Baghriche’s work is not a critique of censorship. He shares a Muslim cultural education with the citizens of the UAE, but grew up in Europe where the relationship to the body is completely different. He is singularly well-placed to discuss these questions in his work. As an artist, but also as a collector, Bagriche is interested by the aesthetic and social value of these hybrid images. For him, they are documents that allow us to question how a society with its own specific set of values finds a way to be open to Western culture in a way that is coherent with these values.