At the Institute of Islamic Cultures, three artists reframe sport as a site of memory, resistance and fragile aspiration.
At the Institute of Islamic Cultures in Paris, ‘Prolongations’ unfolds less as an exhibition than as a lived terrain where bodies, histories and projections collide. Bringing together M’barka Amor, Ouassila Arras and Dalila Dalléas Bouzar, the project emerges from an ongoing dialogue between the three artists, shaped as much by friendship as by shared inquiry.
Curated in collaboration with Horya Makhlouf, the exhibition situates sport not as spectacle but as a charged metaphor. Football, in particular, serves as both a narrative device and a critical lens through which broader questions of social mobility, collective desire, and systemic limitations are examined. What begins as a familiar cultural arena quickly reveals itself as a contested space, marked by aspiration and exhaustion, glory and erasure.
Across sculpture, painting, installation and textile, the artists navigate a visual language that oscillates between the intimate and the monumental. Arras’ gestures of abrasion and excavation echo the layered silences of Franco-Algerian histories, while Amor’s dispersed ceramic forms suggest fragile acts of protection within hostile environments. Dalléas Bouzar’s portraits, often of children bearing the names of sporting icons, hold a quiet tension between identification and displacement. Together, these practices form a constellation of images that resist singular interpretation.
The exhibition’s scenography reinforces this tension. Moving from locker rooms to imagined stadiums, from dimly lit interiors to zones of spectacle, viewers are drawn into a choreography of proximity and distance. Sweat, labour and vulnerability sit uneasily alongside the glitter of fame. The result is not a celebration of sport but a careful dismantling of its mythologies.
What lingers most powerfully is the question of who gets to dream and at what cost. Behind every celebrated athlete lies a multitude of unfulfilled trajectories, bodies shaped by discipline yet marked by exclusion. The exhibition foregrounds these absences, insisting on the structural conditions that determine which dreams are realised and which remain deferred.
In ‘Prolongations’, the game does not end with the final whistle. Instead, it spills outward, into the social and political fabric that surrounds it. The artists propose not an escape from reality but a reconfiguration of it, where strategies of endurance and reinvention take precedence over victory. In this sense, the exhibition extends beyond its own duration, inviting us to consider what it means to remain in play, even when the rules are unevenly set.
