Vit à : Paris , France
Line Ajan is an independent curator that lives and works in Paris. Between 2015 and 2019, she worked at Galerie Imane Farès in Paris, where she participated in the organization of the first exhibitions of Sinzo Aanza, Alia Farid, James Webb and the artist collective On-Trade-Off, amongst others, in Paris. She also assisted in the edition of Emeka Ogboh’s second monograph, Lagos Soundscapes (Kerber Verlag, Belrin, 2018) and Ali Cherri’s first monographi Earth, Fire, Water (Éditions Dilecta, 2021). In parallel, she conducted several long interviews, published in the online magazine Figure Figure, with young artists based in Paris; has written several exhibition texts and has contributed to various catalogues and publications.
In 2019-2020, she is the recipient of the Barjeel Global Fellowship at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Chicago, Illinois. At MCA Chicago, she organized a screening program for the exhibition Alien VS Citizen, with films by Bani Abidi, Neil Beloufa, Meriem Bennani, Bertrand Dezoteux, Steffani Jemison and Elia Suleiman and curated the exhibition The Location of Lines. In 2019, she joined the editorial committee of Qalqalah قلقلة association, a platform for artistic exchange, research and translations.
Drawing from the evocative imagery of sci-fi, Neil Beloufa, Meriem Bennani, and Bertrand Dezoteux each set their works in futuristic times and territories, in which the characters are either extraterrestrials or “posthumans,” whose bodies, minds, and speech diverge from terrestrial norms. Each film plays with the double meaning of the word “alien:” they appropriate elements from science-fiction cinema to reflect on immigration, diasporic communities, and representation as seen through the colonial gaze.
The screening will be followed by a pre-recorded conversation with artist Meriem Bennani and Line Ajan, MCA Barjeel Global Fellow. MCA Screenings feature works of contemporary cinema that expand traditional notions of moviegoing.
Consider movement and belonging in this screening of works by Elia Suleiman, Bani Abidi, and Steffani Jemison. At the second screening session accompanying the exhibition Alien vs. Citizen, we’ll view works uniquely inspired by early twentieth-century absurd and silent cinema, which produce poetic images that reflect on freedom of movement, policing, and alienation in today’s world.
With works by Francis Alÿs, Latifa Echakch, Mona Hatoum, Alfredo Jaar, Emily Jacir, Edward Krasiński, Sol LeWitt, Ana Mendieta, Annette Messager, Howardena Pindell and Zarina
Lines are the first gesture in writing, drawing, and sculpture making them central to representation. While we often describe lines as definitive—“a line in the sand,” or “crossing the line”—artists in this exhibition play with these limits, revealing how they can change and move.
Taking the title from a Sol LeWitt artist’s book, The Location of Lines further examines the form of a line in the context of space and politics. Through a variety of representations in the prints, drawings, photographs, and videos that make up the exhibition, viewers are invited to reconsider the line and its meaning, both in imagination and in reality. These uses span from the abstract to the concrete: the line as a form, as a symbol, as a concept, and ultimately as a geographic border. Each artwork reveals how lines, limits, and borders are constructed and how they can change. After all, for those in power, lines can be erased just as easily as they are drawn.