The exhibition Le bal des Ogresses shifts the gaze away from the fear inspired by Aïcha Kandisha toward what the stories that have shaped her myth reveal. Ogresses and goddesses, monstrous and seductive, nurturing and devouring, protective and malevolent: Aïcha Kandisha and her sister figures become the prism through which to explore intimacy, the body, and collective memory. These hybrid, transgressive creatures crystallize anxieties surrounding the night, femininity, and sexuality.
From pre-Islamic mythologies to Sufi ceremonies, from Amazigh tales to Mesopotamian legends, thirteen women artists from different generations and geographical backgrounds give voice at the ICI to those who tell the stories of ogresses and claim them as their own. They question the paradoxes of these figures, at once feared and revered, objects of desire and sources of dread, who, through the power of oral tradition, elude any fixed representation.