Neïl Beloufa

In 2015, a survey revealed that a third of Americans supported bombing Agrabah, the fictional city from Aladdin. Fifteen percent were unsure. A joke, yes, but also a sign of the times: the deliberate confusion between fiction and geopolitics. In his first exhibition in Portugal, the French-Algerian artist Neïl Beloufa transforms MAC/CCB into an interactive environment where visitors engage with objects and experience chapters of a live computer game (a question mark, a film set in Agrabah, an archive, a karaoke, a bedroom, military barracks, and more). Each visitor’s path is recorded through sensor activation or algorithmic control, turning them into active agents within the exhibition’s fictional narrative. Curator Marta Mestre