Saâdane Afif Curator’s Board (The Professor), 2023

The seven Curator's Boards (2023) each represent one of the seven characters that the protagonist Yasmine encounters in The Heptahedron (2017), a play script commissioned by Afif. These are, in order of appearance: the Professor, the Bonimenteur, the Moped Rider, the Fortune Teller, the Coalman, an Acrobats, and the Tourist. Inspired by Aby Warburg's method of pictorial associations, which the art and cultural scholar developed in the 1920s for his famous pictorial atlas Mnemosyne, the seven magnet boards reveal the depth and possible contradictions that each of the characters holds. The Curator's Boards were created during the Bergen Assembly, which Afif directed as Convener. Here, he first used them as a methodology to sketch out the essential character traits of the seven figures. The work exemplifies Afif's interdisciplinary approach, which is based on the accumulation and interweaving of diverse references and perspectives; both personal and art-historical.