AYN GALLERY was created in 2017, located in the heart of Paris on the Ile Saint-Louis bordering the Seine, in the most prestigious district of Paris.
The AYN gallery brings a keen eye on design and contemporary art through multidisciplinary exhibitions of emerging and established European and foreign artists. Ayn means eye, gaze and critical sense. Design and contemporary art are brought together in the same space, thus merging the creation of art and the ingenuity of design, which are perceived as complementary domains in the Ayn Gallery space where a common dialogue, aesthetics and questioning through the works is established and experienced.
At Supermarket 2021 Ayn gallery presents the Algerian artist Amina Zoubir.
Amina Zoubir’s work focuses on the representation and appropriation of the female body in colonially and ethnographically influenced photographs from North Africa. The MARKK’s photo collection contains many of these photographs, which are a challenging collection for the museum as well. As historical objects and testimonies, the museum stores and preserves them. However, their origin coincides with a time of colonial and
scientifically European-dominated power structures and imbalances, which are directly visible in the photographic representations of people and the images they create. By non-critical reproduction, exhibition and viewing, there is still a danger today of both solidifying these images as well as a continued, violent objectification of the people depicted. In contrast, the strength of Amina Zoubir’s work lies precisely in the fact that, through a deliberate deconstruction and refocusing of these difficult portraits and the images they convey, the people depicted are placed at eye level as subjects, in a break with their historical context of origin, thus made and kept visible in a new way. The serial, collage-like reproduction highlights the extremely high number of women affected by this colonial appropriation of their bodies.