atelier des artistes en exil, Marseille
Reeem Alnatsheh, Peshawa Mahmoud, and Pasmur Rachuiko.
Atelier des artistes en exil presents four artists during Art-o-rama: Reeem Alnatsheh (Palestine), Peshawa Mahmoud (Kurdistan, Iraq), and Pasmur Rachuiko (Russia).
Reem Alnatsheh is interested in the concepts of exile and “home.” She observes how these two realities can merge through the space represented by the bedroom. The bedroom becomes a place of identity and personal experiences. The artist is originally from Hebron, a Palestinian city in the West Bank, where access to plots of land, houses, and entire neighborhoods was forbidden to her. The restrictions imposed on her movements in the city where she grew up led her to seek out other spaces in which to take refuge, spaces that were freer and safer. The bedroom became this imaginary and infinite space where she could live her life and create.
Pasmur Rachuiko describes his pictorial practice as “naive surrealism.”
His works explore the tensions between the center and the periphery in contemporary Russia, but also in Georgia, where he has traveled. Through an aesthetic that blends popular mythology, political criticism, and visual narration, he depicts hybrid figures drawn from a reinvented folklore, emerging from the marginalized world of the “periphery” to disrupt the established order of the “central kingdom.” These ambiguous characters evoke religious icons, Russian social media clichés, and authoritarian archetypes.
In Iraqi Kurdistan, Peshawa Mahmoud works in various media, from painting to monumental works in public spaces, questioning the Iraqi political system and its excesses. In 2007, he created a work on a 36-km stretch of road to raise awareness of the poor condition of the road and its dangers. He seeks to create a confrontation between art and humanity and to provoke a reaction from the public on subjects that matter to them. He is interested in places where art is not present, questioning this absence through a work he installs there: in his view, art exists in these places but is waiting to be made visible. On the road to exile that took him, in 2016, on foot from Kurdistan to Marseille, via refugee camps in Serbia and prison in Hungary, he reinvented his artistic practice, favoring quick drawings made on ephemeral or recycled materials.
