Yasmina Assbane is a Belgian-Moroccan artist based in Brussels.
Her artistic practice is rooted in the banality of the everyday, in material life, with particular attention to the intimate and domestic sphere.
Familiar objects, primarily associated with the private domain, are emptied of their initial function through strategies of dismantling and symbolic reconfiguration. Glass, ceramics, and fibers become inserts of a deconstructed and tested identity, moving between subject and object.
This dialectical tension opens a space for new readings, giving rise to what she calls an aesthetics of retrenchment, composed of withdrawal, tactics, and arrangement.
Borrowed from the art of display, the compositions are intentionally light, reversible, often precariously balanced. They evoke a discreet practice of “arranging things.”
Taken together, the works question invisible power relations and invite a shift in perception. A tipping point is sought, where dominant or initial readings lose their primacy.
Resistance through intimacy dialogue with cultural survival and strategies of circumvention critical reappropriation and symbolic transformation of fixed constructions exploration of intimacy as a site of invisible power interrogation and reactivation of daily gestures displacement of the gaze aesthetics of retrenchment as a critical tactic
The mesh as a supple framework textile as syntax suspension as state gesture as care and restraint emptiness as form glass: fragile, transparent, hollow tension between structure and collapse absence of figure the scale of the body
Yasmina Assbane’s work is grounded in the intimate sphere, approached as a terrain of resistance and power. A space often considered secondary or confined to the private domain becomes, in her practice, a field of action where constraints are transformed into resources.
Her approach operates through the critical re-appropriation and symbolic transformation of fixed constructions, whether material, social, or mental. Objects and materials, normalized for domestic use, are displaced from their function, recombined, adjusted, and presented in ways that open alternative readings. This displacement acts as a strategy of cultural and identity survival, reaffirming the capacity to transform an assigned space into one of emancipation.
The tension running through these installations emerges from the precision of adjustment: nothing is secured by mechanical force, everything holds through the relation of forms and their positioning. The equilibrium is tenuous, never guaranteed; its visible precariousness sharpens the viewer’s awareness of fragility and resistance.
The scale of the body remains implicit: the elements employed, standardized for human use, retain the modesty of objects handled in daily life.