Like many young artists, Soufiane Ababri found himself a bit stuck when he left art school – with no studio, and no money to rent one. So, he became – in his own, Duchampian words – an artiste de valise. The Moroccan artist, who today divides his time between Paris and Tangier, spent several years moving from one flatshare to the next, making and transporting his artworks, largely drawings, along the way. From 2016, Ababri began titling these pieces ‘Bedworks’ to reflect the fact that he makes them in bed. The series, which is arguably his best-known body of work to date, not only points to its site of production as a space distinct from a traditional studio – historically considered the norm for art production – but, for Ababri, also operates as a marker of class division and hierarchy.
‘No one took me seriously at the beginning because I was working from my bed,’ he tells me when we meet at a café in Paris’s Marais neighborhood. Our capitalist society runs on efficiency and productivity, whereas ‘a bed is associated with laziness,’ he continues – and is conducive to neither. Ababri’s fate has clearly changed since. In recent years, he has had solo presentations at galleries including Praz-Delavallade (Paris), THE PILL (Istanbul), and Mendes Wood DM (Brussels). On the day of our interview, he had just returned from opening his first major institutional solo show at The Curve gallery in London’s Barbican.