TINA is pleased to present Swallow, a solo exhibition by Tarek Lakhrissi, featuring a new body of work that includes painting, sculpture, drawing, and film. This exhibition marks a significant shift in Lakhrissi’s practice, embracing a more instinctive, embodied approach to image-making. Working with charcoal, pastels, and paint, Lakhrissi explores the raw potential of colour, the joy of play, and the freedom of uninhibited expression.

Lakhrissi’s process involves working on the floor or directly on the walls, incorporating text while allowing his body to become an integral part of the creative process. Yet, beyond its physicality, the ritualistic nature of his daily studio practice finds a parallel in the repetitive forms, motifs and actions within the works. This rhythm echoes Kathy Acker’s use of repetition, where breaking and remaking becomes an act of transformation, expressed in her 1992 essay, The Language of the Body. In this text, Acker theorises the impossibility of speech and text, to adequately describe or translate the ‘language’ of the body. The essay is about failure, repetition, rejection, and the self. Breaking oneself repetitively, repeatedly, and systematically, both as metaphor and as a constitutive reality in the damaging of muscle to encourage growth. She prefigures breath and counting as a communication of action. An internal attention on the functioning body that forms a communicative exterior, an expressive essence. In Lakh...