It’s showtime!!!, 2025
Plexiglas, satin, car cooling fans, LED light, videos
Dimensions variable
Born in Cairo in 1995, Sherif Sherif is a visual artist based between Paris and Switzerland. Trained in Visual Arts at ECAL, his work unfolds through the mediums of sculpture, video, photography, and installation.
Through these various modes of expression, Sherif explores themes of identity, desire, and migration. Formally, his artistic practice appropriates elements of public space, such as surveillance cameras, urban electrical terminals, and anti-bird spikes. These objects, often custom-reproduced, tell the story of bodies that are controlled, displaced, and surveilled.
Through his choice of materials – plexiglass, red colors and lighting, and 3D printing – Sherif depicts a society where nothing should ever overflow, where everything is regulated, leaving little room for irregularities and singularities to emerge. By using these elements, he reveals the violence exerted by dominant societal norms on marginalised bodies, particularly queer and racialised individuals.
In his book Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (1999), José Esteban Muñoz explains that in a context of strong dominant norms, disidentification becomes a survival strategy for those who do not conform. Since they can neither fully conform to these norms nor outright reject them, minorities must subvert and repurpose them. While Judith Butler argues that all gender identities are performative – constructed through repeated social acts – Muñoz takes this concept further by exploring how these identities are actively shaped and performed through resistance.
As part of his participation in Plattform25, Sherif brings to the forefront a performer executing repetitive gestures. Like a ghost, their silhouette appears and disappears at irregular intervals, across different locations within CAN. Structured in three acts, these ephemeral apparitions and vanishings reflect the violent and disruptive uncertainties of migration and exile.
It’s showtime!!!
At the same time, the curtains of an ingeniously synchronised installation open, signaling the start of this fragmented performance. This high-tension scene reveals its own operating system, yet remains inaccessible and uncontrollable.
For Sherif, these elements of performativity, expressed through It’s showtime!!! (2025), are intrinsically tied to the concept of liminal space. Always existing between different states – transition, suspension, instability, uncertainty – the protagonist embodies this emotional terrain through movement, trapped in a limbo with no clear way out… or perhaps in five minutes?
Katia Leonelli
Translated from French