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Judging by the impressive quantity of ink already spilt on the young Paris-based, French-Algerian artist Neil Beloufa (b. 1985), not to mention the artist’s hectic exhibition schedule, it’s clear that Beloufa has hit an agreeable nerve in the international art scene. With upcoming exhibitions this autumn alone including solos in museums and galleries in Paris, Vancouver, and Vienna and group shows in London and New York, it seems, at this point, just as potentially worthwhile to consider the artist’s arrant appeal in a general sense as in the particulars of his individual practice. In addition to being an interesting and promising artist, is he and his work (negatively or positively) symptomatic of something? If so, what? Let us first proceed with the particulars. Born in 1985 to French-Algerian parents who themselves worked in the film industry, Beloufa grew up with a close link to cinema. While simultaneously attending Beaux arts and L’école des arts décoratifs in Paris, he made the film in 2007 that precipitously launched him into the artistic stratosphere, Kempinski (more on that presently). Thanks to a couple of scholarships, Beloufa complemented his studies with two different stints abroad at Cal Arts in LA and Cooper Union in New York. After graduating in 2009, he enrolled in Le Fresnoy, a highly respected filmmaking school in Lille, France, but dropped out after a year to pursue his snowballing career (for instance, the same year saw him participate in Manifesta 8 in Murcia and do a solo in the Frame section of the Frieze Art Fair). His first solo show took place at New York’s The White Box in 2008, where he exhibited Kempinski, and he was off and running.

Weird, Splendid and Entrancing

Shot in Mali in 2007, Kempinski is a weird, splendid and perfectly entrancing film. It opens with a shot of the sign of the luxury brand hotel Kempinski against a night sky, and proceeds to a series of shots of stadium lights illuminating empty fields. The first Malian we encounter barely illuminates his own grinning face and a nearby cow with a handheld neon light as he mysteriously speaks about his bovine companions and wife: ‘I live in a close cooperation with oxen,’ he explains. ‘They are very frequentable [sic], much more than men. They are friendly too, much more than men. Since the planet on which men lived has saturated [sic], I am the only man who lives with hundreds of oxen. They are my friends; we chat together, and I play with them.… Yesterday, my wife the cow has given birth to two small calves and the baptism is for tomorrow.’ Alternating with landscapes and stadium lights, other neon-light totting Malians are encountered who regale us with similarly gnomic utterances, ranging from speaking motorbikes and cars to telepathic coitus with conjugal counterparts. Of course, upon initial viewing of this enigmatic film, the mind reels in fascinated speculation – for instance, despite Kempinski’s lack of theatrical frenzy, Jean Rouch’s Les Maîtres Fous came to mind for me – but when you learn about the principle, or ‘the game’ (le jeu) Beloufa deployed to compose it, fascination yields to a charmed contemplation. Interested in film genres and how they might play themselves out when bidden forth in the most basic possible terms, Beloufa wanted, in this case, to try his hand at a sci-fi flick. In order to do so, he directed this group of Malians to imagine the future in the present while holding neon lights (light sabres). The resultant reflections, which, in some cases, are obviously influenced by recent Hollywood hits, and in others, by life in Mali itself, were edited into this thirteen-minute film with cinematic simplicity and finesse.

Sculptural Installations

Not merely content to present his films in white cubes, the artist creates sculptural installations in which to view them. Kempinski is accompanied by a bench-like contraption haphazardly fashioned out of found materials with a heavy accent on laminated particle board, MDF, and bad painting as well as a couple of other sculptural elements, which seem to serve no direct purpose in facilitating the viewing. The composition of these elaborate mise-en-scènes is likewise governed by ‘games’, i.e., conceptual parameters or systems, which revolve largely around disclosing the mechanism or artifice of the construction. Hence, their seemingly slapdash character. Clearly preoccupied with controlling the physical conditions in which his films are viewed (it should be stated that Beloufa refuses to screen his films unaccompanied in white cubes), he is also interested in the capacity of those conditions to challenge the authority of the images they serve. The presentation of his three-channel film Sayre and Marcus (2010) in a recent solo exhibition, Changes of Administrations, was framed in perhaps the artist’s most Byzantine mise-en-scène yet, which virtually teemed with constructivist-like, sculptural elements cobbled together out of MDF and a conspicuous surfeit of green screen pigment. The film itself, whose three parts run approximately 45 minutes, falls into the genre of mystery/thriller. Shot in a studio in LA, the film features a kind of politically correct motley host of characters, including a couple of Caucasians, a black guy, a Chinese guy, a half-Native American, as well as a girl and a dog. The game they have been instructed to carry out is simply to find the two killers, as they are picked off by ‘the killers.’ Using a basic technique to build suspense, the camera circles the characters, who are seated in a circle, as they casually throw accusations at each other, trying to figure out who the purported killers are. Constantly challenged by intercut shots of the studio in which it is being filmed as well as adumbrations of eliminated characters hovering in the background, the verisimilitude of the film is deliberately reduced to an absolute minimum, and yet the improvised story is sufficiently engrossing for it to retain some modicum of credibility.Beloufa has mentioned on numerous occasions his preoccupation not so much with the suspension of disbelief per se (fiction/reality), but rather in exploring the space in which that suspension shows its magic hand, and this theatrical preoccupation becomes evident here. Of equal interest however is his exploitation of basic improv theatre techniques and their potential ability to transmit the social, cultural and political truths of a given moment. Forced to think and act on their feet and therefore forfeit any censoring mechanism, the participants of such scenarios tend to disclose what is either taboo or foremost in the collective consciousness. In the case of Sayre and Marcus, one of the actors claims to be a traumatized veteran of Iraq, a detail which is immediately transformed by the others into being ‘a trained killer,’ and, as such, ultimately tantamount to an admission of guilt.

Improvisation

There is something appreciably organic, even messy about such art-making methods. Clearly starting from ideas, ‘games’ or premises, Beloufa creates scenarios whose outcomes are largely unforeseeable for him. This messiness is faithfully reflected in his mise-en-scènes. I suspect that a large part of Beloufa’s appeal comes from the refreshing alternative that such work offers to the parodic neo-conceptual cul-de-sac in which a great deal of contemporary art has seen itself increasingly mired for the past decade, while nevertheless acknowledging that heritage. Thus its appeal comes as much from the work itself as from what it potentially promises. That sense of promise, however, seems to be challenged by certain formal elements and aspects of the sculptural installations, by which I mean MDF and painted patches or fragments of green (or blue) screen interwoven into his installations. Increasingly visible in the work of young artists everywhere, these two formal ciphers are, at this point, almost interchangeable, and in the most problematic way. Like partially constructed theatre sets, these neutral background materials, which are obliged to occupy foregrounds are, generally speaking, often mutually and inherently symptomatic of a lack of content. This deliberate lack, or better yet, void, itself seems to be the combined result of the oft-rued absence of a grand narrative, so-called post-critical crises, the lack of centre these issues necessarily bear in their wake, and Duchamp’s dreaded but true, and egregiously abused, throwaway about ‘the viewer completing the painting’ – a thought-meme which many young artists could be said to take advantage of, or perhaps better yet, succumb to, by barely even starting the painting at all. Of course, Beloufa could hardly be accused of such lackadaisical methods, but I wonder if the partially constituted deployment of materials, which are increasingly and voluntarily stigmatized by a fundamental lack of conviction, do his films the justice they deserve? The films seem just too good, occasionally strange and promising for that. Chris Sharp is a writer and curator in Paris, and editor-at-large of Kaleidoscope magazine