Le bal des Ogresses
When: 25.09.2026 19:00
Where: 48.887787, 2.353435
Organizer: Admin
On the occasion of the Mediterranean Season organized by the Institut français, the ICI team continues its partnership with guest curator Sonia Recasens – initiated in 2024 with L’esprit du geste, the inaugural exhibition of the renovated spaces of ICI Léon. She now accompanies her new project, which takes as a starting point the legends surrounding Aïcha Kandisha, in order to explore the many ogress figures that populate the imaginations of the Mediterranean periphery and beyond.
The exhibition Le bal des Ogresses shifts the gaze from the fear inspired by Aïcha Kandisha to what the stories that forged her myth reveal. Ogresses and goddesses, monstrous and seductive, nurturing and devouring, protective and malevolent: Aïcha Kandisha and her sister figures become the prism of an exploration of the intimate, the body and collective memory. These hybrid and transgressive creatures crystallize fears surrounding night, femininity, sexuality.
From pre‑Islamic mythologies to Sufi ceremonies, from Amazigh tales to Mesopotamian legends, thirteen women artists of different generations and geographies make heard at the ICI the voices of those who tell ogress stories and claim them. They question the paradoxes of these figures both feared and venerated, objects of desire and terror, which through the power of orality escape any fixed representation.
The artists
Khadija El Abyad, Rim Battal, Amina Benbouchta, Imane Elkabli, Lucile Gautier, Nadira Husain, Saodat Ismailova, Kubra Khademi, Rim Mejdi, LALLA RAMI, Lynn S.K., Silina Syan, and Nil Yalter.
About the curator
Sonia Recasens (1985, France) is an art historian, art critic and independent exhibition curator. She develops an engaged, sensitive and intuitive critical and curatorial practice, exploring issues related to the intimate, the body, memory or migration. Winner of the Special Jury Prize – Prix AICA France 2019, Sonia Recasens regularly collaborates with art centers, museums and publishing houses for publications, conferences or exhibitions. Among her recent exhibitions: L’esprit du geste, 2024 (ICI, Paris); Aïta, poetic fragments of a Moroccan scene, 2025 (Frac Méca Nouvelle Aquitaine, Bordeaux).
Tags: women artists, exhibition, contemporary art
Source: https://www.paris.fr/evenements/prolongations-117197
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