Immediately upon entering Saâdane Afif’s exhibition at the Institut d’Art Contemporain, the visitor was presented with a mystery. After first passing through a hall of posters that seemed to promote various rock concerts but proved on closer...

Immediately upon entering Saâdane Afif’s exhibition at the Institut d’Art Contemporain, the visitor was presented with a mystery. After first passing through a hall of posters that seemed to promote various rock concerts but proved on closer inspection to derive from the artist’s previous exhibitions, I found myself in a square white room, empty but for a small black radio transmitter with a steel aerial measuring several feet and housed in Perspex. An inscription on the transmitter’s surface indicated it was ‘microprocessor controlled’ and ‘quartz-lock synthesized’, but this offered few indications of its meaning or purpose. The first clue, as so often in this exhibition, came via our ears.

The next room contained the receiver to that transmitter: a Tivoli Audio ‘Songbook’ portable radio. But before I could tune my auditory nerves to the songs it played, another sound caught my attention: an insistent ticking from a fourth room interceded, a reminder of the clock’s tyranny over recorded music; the music industry’s cult of youth, and the threat of extinction that hangs over the whole industry today. So, like a detective, I proceeded to piece together the puzzle; or, perhaps more aptly, like a psychoanalyst, scouring symptoms in search of a syndrome. The works in Afif’s exhibition, from sculptures and painted canvases to wall texts and found objects, could be the fragments dreamt by a frustrated musician, into which we plunge slowly deeper.

Read the rest of my review of Saâdane Afif’s show at Villeurbanne’s Institut d'Art Contemporain in Frieze.

10/25/13 at 9:17am
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