Aïcha’s world – but is it even possible to speak of a “world” if its experience is only fed by the night terrors haunting us in our dreams? And by hopes for a different life – a better, more beautiful one?
Is the big, wide world not replete with wanderlust, with real journeys and imagined ones, with foreign cities and unfamiliar continents?
Which world does “Aïcha’s world” refer to? That confined, walled-in world built for convicts, or rather the world of childhood, one that, like no other, is filled with fantasy and imagination? Playful and then again furnished with monsters? It is indeed the world of childhood: it comes closest to “Aïcha’s world”. When all the objects and figures are enormous and dominate the entire appearance of the imaginative power: the iron bed frame and the blood-filled bathtub, all the ingredients of the horrific images that are etched into the retina of memory, from the suicide of the mother to being incarcerated. Projected onto the weight of the wooden picture support, the objects of this world now stand before us: witnesses to a harshness and cruelty that know no mercy. Not even for the child. Especially not for the child. The child is the actual victim in each painting.
Decades later, this victim picks up a paintbrush and paints to get this world off her chest: not so much steeled by later life, but rather irrevocably raw from life. This wound is the bleeding source for every single painting. The idyllic scenes in between – those about a successful life, love, peace and rampant beauty – are painted by the other source of memory: the one that is used to build a refuge in order to withstand reality. Those safe spaces you retreat to when you are at a loss and start dreaming up an ideal world.

Klaus Albrecht Schröder

Artists: Aïcha Khorchid