Khadija Jayi

Khadija Jayi, Goddess of Hell
- Article by Salima El Aissaoui (translated from French to English by ChatGPT)

A graduate of the Fine Arts Institute of Tetouan in 2018, the young visual artist transcends her internal burns by setting fire to paper, just enough to mark it but not enough to completely obliterate it. Creation or destruction? For Khadija Jayi, the two go hand in hand. The urgency to express her pain pushes her to use one of the symbols of destruction, fire, as her medium. By burning the bundles of paper that make up her works, the young artist ravages the medium she could have used to express herself through imagery. At the end of a creative vandalism process, with careful torch blows, the memory of the fire imprints on the sheet the slow and painful time of suffering. Her wall installations, bristling with layers of burned paper and enhanced with varnish and red threads that resemble tiny veins, evoke the texture of burned skin.