Le bal des Ogresses

With "Le bal des Ogresses", the ICI team continues its collaboration with guest curator Sonia Recasens, presenting a new project that takes the legends surrounding Aïcha Kandisha as a starting point to explore the many figures of ogresses that populate the collective imagination across the Mediterranean and beyond.

The exhibition shifts the focus from the fear inspired by Aïcha Kandisha to what is revealed by the stories that have shaped her myth. Ogresses and goddesses, monstrous and seductive, nurturing and devouring, protective and malevolent: Aïcha Kandisha and her sister figures become a prism through which to explore intimacy, the body and collective memory.

These hybrid and transgressive creatures crystallise fears surrounding the night, femininity and sexuality. From pre-Islamic mythologies to Sufi ceremonies, from Amazigh tales to Mesopotamian legends, thirteen female artists from different generations and regions bring to ICI the voices of those who tell stories of ogresses and claim them as their own.

They explore the paradoxes of these figures – as feared as they are revered, objects of both desire and dread – who, through the power of oral tradition, elude any fixed representation.