On the work of Omar Koubâa
The work is both a visual and a mental journey. The activities are part of a unique history. They involve participation in an event that exceeds the self on all sides. What we are witnessing is a process of constant regeneration. It is a process of appropriation and relinquishing, of following trails and voices in a shifting space in which you are constantly presented with new perspectives. Any lasting insight – any resolution – is repeatedly postponed. And in this ambiguous, undulating fabric, in this shimmering interaction of tentative instances, a different dimension manifests itself: something of the other. At some point in his essay ‘Eye and Mind’, Merleau-Ponty writes: “We must take literally what vision teaches us: namely, that through it we touch the sun and the stars, that we are everywhere at once, as close to things that are far as to those that are nearby, and that even our power to imagine ourselves elsewhere – I am in Petersburg in my bed; in Paris, my eyes see the sun – or freely to envision real beings, wherever they are, borrows from vision and employs means we owe to it. Vision alone teaches us that beings that are different, ‘exterior’, foreign to one another, are yet absolutely together: it shows us ‘simultaneity’.”