Soufiane Ababri, the young, taboo-breaking star of Morocco’s modern art scene, sees creativity as a way to “invert the insults” he has heard all his life. Growing up gay in Morocco, and then becoming an immigrant in France, he was part of what he calls a post-colonial generation, in which people of colour felt fetishised and were often subject to violence. His answer to all the name-calling and worse is an approach to drawing that is irreverent, erotic and full of riotously bright colours. “It’s all about transforming the stigma,” Ababri says.
So when Ababri saw the crescent shape of the Barbican’s Curve gallery in London, where he is about to stage his first solo show at a major UK institution, it reminded him of the curling form of the Arabic letter zayn (ز), and the z sound at the start of the word zamel, a derogatory term for gay men. “It’s a word I heard at school,” he says. “I have no doubt queer and LGBT children in Morocco still face it: that repeated zzzz sound, like a bumblebee, as you walk past people in school corridors.” This persecution gives his show its title: Their mouths were full of bumblebees but it was me who was pollinated.
