A Voice from Afrikanizm on a Global Stage

In a landmark moment for both artist and our platform, visual artist Sherin ElBaroudi brings her evocative piece A Different Space to the Beijing International Art Biennale 2025. 

ElBaroudi (Afrikanizm Artist) joins an international cohort in exploring this year’s theme: "Coexistence."

Marking the 80th anniversary of the World Anti-Fascist War victory, the 2025 edition of the Biennale embraces peace as a civilisational ideal. In a world confronting extremism, climate shifts, and technological disruption, art becomes a vital force in reaffirming human dignity and emotional intelligence. ElBaroudi’s work not only echoes these concerns but also reframes them through a deeply African and philosophical lens.

A Painting That Opens, Rather Than Closes

Measuring 210 x 160 cm, A Different Space is executed in acrylic and gold leaf on canvas. But its power lies beyond materiality. ElBaroudi invites the viewer into a spatial and temporal field where the self is not singular but plural—fragmented, overlapping, and eternally evolving.

Informed by Islamic art’s cosmological view, the canvas does not aim to capture a fixed moment or location. Instead, it fuses bodies, faces, and symbols in a kaleidoscope of simultaneity. The result is not a scene but a portal—a mirror of the multiverse we inhabit.

Through delicate transparencies and layered textures, gold leaf refracts light across the surface, suggesting sacred illumination and timelessness. The visual effect enhances the spiritual architecture of the work: ethereal, yet grounded.

Philosophy Meets Form

The piece draws conceptually from Michel Foucault’s critique of the modern self and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s idea of the body as a medium of perception. Here, the human form is not anatomical, but existential—a trace of memory, emotion, and transformation.

Gold leaf punctuates the canvas with sacred symbolism, while layers of acrylic generate tension between fragility and resilience. Abstract outlines of faces and fluid silhouettes appear, disappear, and re-emerge—mirroring the rhythms of thought, migration, and cultural layering.

The painting resists final interpretation, instead asking: how do we coexist with ourselves, with others, with time?

Coexistence as a Living Tension

ElBaroudi’s work positions coexistence not as an endpoint, but as an ongoing negotiation—between history and future, body and spirit, tradition and change. Her contribution to the Biennale is both a personal inquiry and a universal proposition.

At a moment when the art world is re-evaluating its centres of power, Sherin ElBaroudi’s presence in Beijing signals the rise of African and diasporic voices not as guests, but as essential authors of the future.

Her participation also marks a new chapter in her career, establishing her voice on the global stage and inviting collectors, curators, and scholars to engage with the philosophical depth of her practice.