Saddie Choua explores how our visual language is produced and consumed, and how it shapes our self-image and historical consciousness. She primarily works with video, using footage, scripts, editing, and scenography to expose the power structures that influence our visual culture and public discourse.
Employing meta-documentary techniques, Choua plays with collage and autobiographical elements, appropriating popular intercultural formats such as soap operas. In doing so, she highlights themes such as racism, social inequality, and discrimination against women, subverts dominant media imagery, and sharpens our critical awareness.
During her residency, Choua is working on Het Maandblad voor de allochtone vrouw—a video-based project inspired by Partner, Maandblad voor mannen, a men’s magazine published by Louis Paul Boon in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In Het Maandblad voor de allochtone vrouw, Choua brings together everything that supposedly interests "the allochtone woman": literature, fashion, travel, (autochtone) men…
Inspired by Boon’s magazine and his Fenomenale Feminateek, as well as by John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, Choua reverses the gaze: with humor, she claims the female perspective and directs it at the (white) male body. She critically analyses how “the other” is stereotyped in our society.
The magazine thus explores how images are constructed and reveals the underlying social and political power structures through popular formats like reports, horoscopes, and letters to the editor. The viewer is invited to question their own position. As part of this project, Choua assembles an editorial board for the magazine and sets up a photo studio in the workspace—or will it become a sewing atelier for a new fashion line?
Het Maandblad voor de allochtone vrouw is also connected to the thesis she wrote during her sociology studies. Titled De Dwaze Moeders, it gathered interviews with Brussels-Moroccan mothers about the problems the police have with their sons and the fear these situations instilled in them. The title refers to the Argentine group Moeders van de Plaza de Mayo, who fought for their disappeared children and challenged the Argentine military regime between 1976 and 1983. These interviews have long been a recurring thread in Choua’s work and are now being further developed in an artistic project.
The residency takes place in the exhibition space of rhizome_, located in the station district of Kortrijk.
