What is it to make something without it becoming about you? The question arises as Sarah Benslimane is mid-installation, surrounded by fragments of unfinished sculptures, just hours before the opening of her solo show at Palais de l’Athénée — a collab between MAMCO & Société des Arts de Genève.
Benslimane, the most recent laureate of the Manor Art Prize, stands before a large tableau — a painting of sorts — upholstered in cow hide and edged in astroturf, its surface sectioned into a grid. Inside its squares, thousands of Mancala stones float in a sea of Pepto-Bismol pink, like manufactured gems embedded into an emulsion of mechanically separated chicken. The materials, at once outdoorsy but anesthetised, meet each other in a way that is both unnervingly artificial and strangely natural.
The pink, she explains, is paint.
“For me, painting has to be useful,” she says. “It’s not for covering, it’s glue.”
It’s a statement that sounds technical, but beneath it lies a kind of manifesto. In Benslimane’s practice, painting no longer belongs to the logic of representation — it becomes tectonic. In this case, it binds rather than depicts. “I use paint to make things hold,” she continues, “because colour can also be pressure.” This refusal to treat painting as image, and instead as something that holds the image together, positions her within a lineage of artists who understand destruction as a form of composition — where fracture, accident, and refusal are not failures but material strategies.
Near the centre of the tableau, one rectangle breaks from the bejewelled pattern, and is occupied by the image of a young girl with brown hair, holding a three-dimensional key that juts out of the painting like a video game token. The resemblance of the young girl to the artist is notable — which may be precisely the point.
“It’s a stock photo,” she explains. A Dreamstime image. “People think it’s me because it’s a brown little girl. It’s dumb.” She laughs, but the critique is sharp. “As I am a woman and as I am an Arab woman, everybody expects me to speak about that. You expect me to speak only about my pussy? C’mon.”
“It’s a game of putting the biggest archetype of an image and then people think it’s me. Even when you know it’s not me, you can’t stop yourself from seeing me in it.” In other words: try to pigeonhole me and you will be the one who is trapped.
“Everyone’s speaking about their identity, their trauma, etc. Everyone’s only speaking about themself. I think art is about the opposite,” she goes on to explain.
This self-aware interplay between intention and reception enacts a kind of conceptual trolling that follows viewers around the exhibition: the artist orchestrates misreading as a strategy, foregrounding the interpretive labour demanded of the audience.
Across the room, another photograph: this time, it is her. A sheet of passport photos, arranged in their usual grid. It is the most bureaucratic image of identity imagineable, categorically governed by rules — no smile, ears exposed, no hat. Here, the artist’s “real” face becomes the least expressive, least personal version of her, in some ways even less “her” than the stock photo. A recognition system reduced to its bare minimum. The tension between these two images — the faux portrait mistaken for her, and the official one that denies expression and streamlines identity — may speak to the paradox at play: how systems designed to verify us often end up flattening us, and how images that pretend to represent us sometimes feel truer than those that purport to fix who we are.
In another room, a photograph shows yet another figure: the artist’s brother, holding a pizza box that Benslimane asked him to turn into an artwork. The piece is his in gesture, yet altogether hers in conception. Across her practice, Benslimane occasionally involves those close to her — her mother, for example, or curator Julien Fronsacq — delegating instructions that are delivered with striking precision.
Seemingly modest details reveal a mode of authorship that is less about direct expression than about orchestration. Even the choice of materials follows this logic; as Fronsacq notes almost in passing that Ikea’s BLODLÖNN mirrors happen to have the most reliable thickness to fracture in a controlled manner — almost the way one would recite a paint recipe.
Benslimane plays with the sentimental — representational photographs, small charms, collectible seashells — while simultaneously animating the mundane. A cheeky construction of ladders is, at its core, nothing more than a handful of step ladders fastened together; yet the way they fan upward like a ferris wheel, holding the centre of the room with the confidence of a performer, adorned in fairy lights and flashing jazz hands, draws unexpected force from basic materials. We are confronted with our own assumptions about what these objects are and what they should do — until Benslimane gently overturns them.
For all her teasing, though, she never abandons the viewer; she may troll them down a maze of their own expectations, but she will hold their hand while doing so. What emerges is a deep sense of humanity and a study into the economies of legibility.
Rarely sketching in advance and preferring to respond directly to material and spatial conditions, her works unfold less as gestures than as equations — structures to be solved rather than scenes to be read. It is a practice that asks the audience to meet the work halfway, rather than offering up an artist’s profile on a silver platter.
The work exposes how the representational economy functions — not through what she reveals, but through what viewers project. This logic directly confronts the institutional machinery that conditions her exhibition — the infrastructure through which visibility, legitimacy, and recognition are produced. And it is here that Manor inevitably comes into view.
The Swiss department store Manor is a household name in Europe’s neutral playground – a major node in the tangle of commerce, culture, and everyday life. With 59 locations across the country, its reach and influence spans fashion, cosmetics, home goods, electronics, toys, interiors, and even groceries; shaping Swiss consumer habits from wardrobe to pantry.
Enter the Manor Art Prize: an annual cultural appendage to this retail giant, designed to spotlight young emerging Swiss artists. Selected by museum directors rather than via open call, its winners are granted institutional exposure, financial support, and the premise of a public springboard. It is, in essence, a prize grafted onto the country’s most familiar commercial organism — where art becomes both supported and, inevitably, branded.
By circulating through different regions, the Prize presents itself as decentralising Swiss cultural identity. Although describing itself — twice — on its own website as an international calling card, its promise to “raise the profile” of the artists it awards is an interesting choice of words. Inevitably what circulates is not a plurality of local identities, but a standardised, exportable one identity: an institutional Swissness clean enough for catalogues, collectors, and committees. In this sense, the Prize does not simply recognise identity; it produces it.
And so, here, the gift reveals its teeth: it operates as a gate.
Within this paradox, the Young Artist Prize emerges as a curious beast: part opportunity, part performance, part trap. Through the work of Sarah Benslimane, we encounter this beast head on. Her practice unsettles precisely the kind of singular, cohesive authorial identity that the proverbial “institution” hopes to display — a polished, stock-photo version of an artist. But instead of relishing in the limelight, Benslimane is antagonising misinterpretation and provoking the viewer into recognising their own projections. As the exhibition takes shape, it becomes clear through the artist’s vision and delegation that authorship, for her, is not a matter of asserting presence — it’s a matter of distributing it.
Instead, she presents dispersed authorship, splintered identity, and a material logic that refuses to align with the neat, legible narrative the Prize longs for. In doing so, her work quietly lays bare the institution’s reliance on tidy, marketable personas — the very fibres on which its international “calling card” is printed.
What comes into focus in the exhibition is less a definitive image of the artist than a sense of how such an image continually slips away. Benslimane’s works allow identity to blur, materials to behave unpredictably, and authorship to move lightly between hands — never quite settling, never fully claimed.
Within the framework of a prize that inevitably shapes how an “emerging artist” is seen, her practice seems to open the edges rather than close them: instructions, small fractures, borrowed gestures, and moments of misreading quietly redistribute where meaning sits. The result is a body of work that invites both viewers and institutions to consider how much of “the artist” is constructed around the work rather than within it.
In this sense, Benslimane does not simply inhabit the contradictions of the Manor Art Prize — she exposes its architecture, showing how visibility is built, borrowed, and, at times, undone.
MAMCO X Société des Arts de Genève
Manor Art Prize 2025
30.10—20.12.2025
more info here
