Born in 1983 in Les Sables d'Olonne (FR).
Lives and works in Brussels and Paris.

By Marie Moignard (A translation by Philippe Dumaine)

Mehdi-Georges Lahlou is the enfant terrible of an art that does not exist. Or not yet, since he is in the process of inventing it. How to be an artist of the interstice today, when navigating between north and south, between cultures, between several media, between multiple intertwined notions? "Do not see the problem through the wrong end of the telescope", is what he seems to (omit to) tell us.

By way of a reinvented surrealism, Mehdi-Georges Lahlou has chosen to show us, as through a keyhole, what we refuse to see, know, or understand. With the dual identity that follows him like a second skin – given his compound name - Mehdi-Georges guides us in his interior world, sprinkled with his wild kid antics. He raises the burlesque to a high art status, playing with the symbols of the Muslim tradition, opposing them to the one, arrogant and showy, of its red stilettos. More than fetishes, these shoes are a kind of "animal totem" for the artist, both cathartic and vector of representation.

While questioning the field of possibilities forever irreconcilable, he invests his own body as a ground for reflection on the "sexual body" faced with identities, including religious, and likes to divert the signs of traditional culture to engage in a new "Muslim aesthetic".

His performances, fueled by his early training as a dancer, leave a bittersweet taste in the mouth, and the knowingly caused laughter can quickly turn sour. His stubbornness to achieve the wildest challenges, with a seriousness bordering on insolence, at the same time tries to downplay the thorniest issues raised by his work and to replace them, incognito, at the forefront: the clichés associated with Muslim women, nudity, sexual gender in spirituality, are as many subjects, both sensitive and essential, so rarely treated with such rigor. Because beyond the inevitable provocation rests, at the core, the strength of commitment.

"Someone told me that the wonder had passed", he writes, as a disillusioned child, in champagne-colored letters, or on gold paper. Well, not quite, since Mehdi-Georges is still looking for it.

Just Another Mouth to Feed explores visual culture of shame associated with vulnerability in its personal and socio-political dimensions. Shame is a painful feeling about oneself as a person. It is an innate human reaction rooted in childhood experience, and it is linked to sexuality and the cultural norms that regulate the body. In this performance, I create a fictional figure, a girl who wears a mouthpiece and diaper. The reason she is like that is because when she was born, she was told that she was just another mouth to feed. At her time and the place she was born, being a girl is a mistake. For her, the shame—the mouth—is like a birthmark that she has to carry from her birth to death. In this work, I divided her life to seven stages: Newborn, Childhood, Youth, Adult, Mid Age, Elder, and Death. She encounters and expresses different type of shame in each stage of her life.

Even though experiencing shame is painful, shame has potential to transform experiences. In fact, it can spur personal freedom by providing a method of penetrating self-discovery and offers the potential for empathy. It brings heightened awareness, awaking self and body consciences. In this work, the shame is used not only as a strategy of resistance, but also as interrogation to seek altered states of consciousness that probably leads to salvation and restores humanity.

Chun Hua Catherine Dong is a Chinese-born performance artist living in Canada. She graduated from Emily Carr University Art & Design and holds MFA at Concordia University. She has been invited to perform in multiple international venues, such as the 9th Kaunas Biennial in Lithuania, Infr’ Action International Performance Art Festival in Italy, Internatinales Festival für Performance in Germany, and Place-des-art in Canada. Her work has been exhibited in North America, Europe and Asia. Her research is supported by Canada Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, British Columbia Arts Council, and Concordia University Faculty of Fine Arts.