Sunday, March 22, 2026, from 6:00 PM, L’Ascensore is pleased to present Azizti, a solo exhibition by Sonia Kacem, with a critical text by Carlo Corona.

"Turning around with patient and slow glances resting on rough, discarded materials, on Arab-Norman matrix geometries, on curves with baroque sensitivity, on floral motifs of Liberty fabrics, on grotesques, or again on impressions of color and light, Sonia Kacem's research begins. Here, on display at L’Ascensore, she allows her visual arsenal, first eagerly recorded as a fragment through the painterly gesture of the brush and then silently kept as a visual sketch in the small format of the sheet, to emerge from its unexpressed dimension, to open and expand multidimensionally in space, and then dissolve into ornamental fragments." (Carlo Corona)

Biography

Sonia Kacem (1985) lives and works in Geneva, where she obtained her master's degree from the Haute École d’Art et de Design (HEAD) in 2011. Her artistic practice has followed a trajectory from large-scale scattered, volatile, soft, and ephemeral sculptures (2008-2016), to structured, disassembled, mobile, and constructed large-scale sculptures and environments (2015-2019), to the current phase, which began in 2020, relating to the built environment. In this latest phase, she focuses on resizing works to the confined and domestic context of furniture, considering both the object and the gesture, reworking sculpture in relation to painting, lithography, and printing techniques - for example, wallpaper or hand-painted craft decorations on the surface of ceramic tiles. Sonia Kacem works on the thin and risky line between abstraction and ornament, where abstraction and repetition clash with spontaneous gesture to create something unstable at the center of a motif that is never an exact copy. The forms derive from recent sketches or doodles made in Tunis, Geneva, Amsterdam, Brussels, Cairo, and recently Palermo, giving rise to a gestural vocabulary, with attention to craftsmanship and how sculpture participates in finishing materials.