TAREK LAKHRISSI

His work evokes nostalgia for TV shows from the late 1990s and early 2000s.

TEXT BY TYLER AKERS

PORTRAITS BY EMIL KOSUGE

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At KANAL - Centre Pompidou in Brussels, occupying a former Citroën garage near the Charleroi Canal, artist Tarek Lakhrissi has installed RISING, a billboard wrapped around the building’s façade for six months. Towering above the surrounding streets, a self portrait depicts the artist dressed in wide-legged pants and a black leather jacket adorned with white feathered angel wings, looking downward but walking forward, backdropped by a desolate bed of gray lava and a hellscape’s red skies. The scene is simultaneously ominous and sanguine, the figure of hope in the belly of the beast. Centering himself, Lakhrissi lives out his childhood dream of pop stardom becoming a blockbuster protagonist — “taking up space,” he asserts, as a French-Moroccan queer person.