Sara Sadik. Khtobtogone

In Khtobtogone , Sara Sadik deconstructs representations and stereotypes associated with young people from French working-class neighbourhoods, who come from North African immigrant backgrounds, as well as notions of masculinity and vulnerability, reintegrating them into fictional narratives. The work of Sara Sadik (Bordeaux, 1994, lives and works in Marseille, France) has been shaped by urban culture, with references to rap music, action-adventure video games and social media. Khtobtogone – a title taken from a discussion between French rappers in a 2019 Snapchat video – focuses on Zine, a young working-class man from the Maghrebi diaspora in Marseille, and his daily life, marked by friendships and the transformative love he feels for his girlfriend, Bulma, to whom he wants to propose. As in other works, in Khtobtogone the artist works with computer-generated imagery sourced from the game Grand Theft Auto V , drawing on references to music videos and what Sadik calls beurcore , a term referring to the urban culture of young people from the Maghrebi diaspora in France. Sara Sadik proposes contemporary narratives about life in cities and the various forms of social and political violence exerted on these young bodies, while celebrating individual and collective expressions of cultural diversity and identity.