2Fik - The Marriage of Abdel and Fatima
January 8, 2024
By: Sami Basbous
Meet 2Fik, the unabashed SWANA “Faggot” artist fearlessly breaking boundaries
In This Boy’s Life, Leonardo de Caprio kisses a character named Arthur Gayl. He’s a misfit, carries his lithe upright body with elegant subtle demeanors, has curious beady black eyes, and a confident voice he uses to good effect as an instrument of his cleverness. This is whom the artist known as 2Fik reminds me of.
2Fik’s creative process of photographing himself began in 2005. The self-portraitures evolved from Anna Wintour’s wig and dresses to demure hijabs with light makeup, high heels, and accessories until the strange cast burdened the play. 2Fik began to hem their colorful semblance into full-blown personas, giving them names and biographies. Soon, each portrait embodied an identity, a gender, an image deeply rooted in him. This emancipation allowed him to embrace himself. Viewers project themselves onto his portraits. But if his portraits recall those of Cindy Sherman’s, 2Fik's art is ground-breaking and defiant in its provocative, designative originality.
When he started, 2Fik already openly identified himself as; take a deep, invigorating breath; a tan-skinned, cis-gender, French-born Canadian, North African, Moroccan Berber, Muslim cultured Montrealer, and openly gay.
“Faggot, not gay,” 2Fik clarifies, “is the powerful political term I advocate because of the privileges I don’t have compared to gay white men and also that heteronormativity - nor homonormativity - does not resonate with me.”
One could feel the hate and pressure 2Fik experienced and how, instead of breaking him, it emboldened him. He understands how his image and identity paved an inspirational way for others to speak their truths. Besides the alluring cultural, historical, and mythical mystery his artwork manifests and questions, it is unique because of how a Halal youth grew to proudly assert his selfhood with his subliminal self and live his truth like different seeds that make a pomegranate fruit through photographic portraits on canvases unabashedly and unapologetically.
There is undeniably a humorous aspect to 2Fik’s work, but looking closer and deeper, prejudice, racism, homophobia, misogyny, rape, trauma... are graphically derived from the artist’s human cells into photographic pixels.
“When someone laughs, you create a space to touch their soul and exchange on a more profound level... I suffered at the start of my career. I was harshly judged in the gay community. I was desexualized and dehumanized. The emasculation was rough. But, putting things into perspective, how my work is interpreted doesn’t concern me. If I get an emotional reaction, I get the crown because I did my job,” he judiciously explains.
“Back then, image and identity were less trendy than art and cultural subjects. You had Cindy Sherman, Yasumasa Morimura, Anthony Giolcolea, or Samuel Fosso, but no one who looked like me did that. No one like me was asking the questions I was asking. I realized that thoroughly niche art can be truly universal.”
2Fik tells me of three hurtful instances in his life that spurred his heart: being called an Arab in France, a Frenchman in Morocco, and when he arrived in Quebec, being told he spoke too good French for an Arab.
“I thought, wow, I don’t fit anywhere! A headline in Journal de Montréal made me click. It was alluding to the province's dangers of losing the French language. This white French-speaking society is telling me that they fear losing their French. I thought these derogative terms I was called and my personal questions about my identity were also happening to white people. I realized that questioning your identity has nothing to do with age, color, origin, or religion. Questioning your identity is universal. And since everyone seems to have a say on who and what I am—an Arab? a fag? a French? a terrorist? —why don’t I play with image and identity and expose my vulnerabilities as an artist? When a white man disagrees with how his identity is perceived, he is defending himself. When a SWANA person from the LGBTQ+ community does, they are being aggressive. At the core, what is a man? Is a man wearing a dress and high heels? Is he less of a man because of it? Above all, I am human, and my work became therapeutic with time.”
Nan Goldin’s ideas of intimacy and the unspoken things that lie beneath the surface are what 2Fik aspires to.
“My dream is to create art as powerful as hers. My work has pushed me into the darkest abyss. When you fully give yourself to art, you become a machine, delving, sundering, altering, producing, and reproducing the self. My last exhibition in Montreal in 2021 at the FestivalTransAmérique was called “Romance ain’t dead, 2Fik!”. It was a transdisciplinary piece I worked on for 7 years about the representation of self on Dating Apps. The concept was that I developed my own dating app where the public could create a profile, chat, and seduce my characters to get a date at la Cinquième Salle in Place des Arts, where the show was presented. I was unobserved, answering all the messages my 100 characters received in real-time. It was intense. I never revealed this publicly, but my then-boyfriend decided to catfish me and my characters. He used a random guy’s photo and chatted his way to get a date with one of my characters. When he got to the theater, he decided to play a certain role that revealed nearly everything about our intimate, personal life and my deepest secrets and fantasies. All this was in front of the public; some knew he was my partner. I did my best not to break, but it was tough. That moment truly destroyed me. Me and my Art were violated publicly. How could I survive this? How can I get back up from seeing the work I’ve been building for years just crash and burn in front of my eyes? One of my aims for “Romance ain’t dead, 2Fik!” was to question my own limits vis-à-vis my art; the cruel part was that someone I was deeply in love with used his knowledge of my person and my creative process to violently use it against me. Yet, I’m thankful: I fell hard, took all that happened, reconnected with my guts, and now I’m rising like a phoenix.”
Asked what his seminal experience has been, 2Fik offers hope beyond sentimentality. He passionately speaks of how the new generation, and specifically the present SWANA community, is openly out, discussing gender identity, intersexuality, queerness, colonization, and decolonization, expressing itself sexually and culturally, freeing these subjects from their exclusive academic shackles. He hopes and believes we should continue to deconstruct the idea of image, shake and shape our existence out of grief and pain, and confidently stamp our timeless history in time because we need to take charge in writing our true ever-evolving narrative because magic happens in realization.
2Fik’s characters are now becoming of service to him and not the opposite. With this awareness, he meditates on his new work, adopting multi-disciplinary art forms: writing, installation, performance, or all simultaneously. 2Fik is an impelling artist who inspires us to drop all perceived perceptions that make us feel unworthy, break the mirror, purge, reassemble, and transfigure these perceptions into positive and creative fragments and reflections authentic to our whole.
You can catch 2Fik at Samuel Larochelle’s LGBTQ+ Cabaret “Accents Queer” event at Usine C in Montreal on the 22nd of March.
2Fik photography by Albert Zablit
Further Reads:
- Habibi Let's Be Proud Together - Pride 2023 Campaign
- My Identity is Political in Every Way
- Always Sexualized But Never Prioritized
- My Journey as a Sexologist: Carine Abou Dahab's, B.A. Sexology
