Lydia Ourahmane's Coin-Operated Venice Biennale Show
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- Lydia Ourahmane is exhibiting at Venice's Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation timed to the Venice Biennale, having lived on the Giudecca for months to develop the show from inside the city
- Ourahmane's Venice show centres on a permanent pier built on Poveglia island in collaboration with a local cooperative that acquired the island a decade ago to resist luxury-resort development
- The artist acquired a coin-operated machine from the church of San Giovanni Crisostomo — which illuminates a Bellini altarpiece of St Jerome when a euro is inserted — swapping it with the priest for a newer model; visitors to her show must pay a euro to see the lights
- Ourahmane also borrowed 1.3 tonnes of decommissioned Venetian hotel bedlinen for what became "an oddly mesmerising sculpture," while an idea to build an instrument to "play the light of the sun" was shelved
- Her 2014 Goldsmiths degree show included 20 Naftal-branded oil barrels imported from Algeria after months of bureaucratic wrangling, becoming the first legally exported artwork from the country since independence in 1962
- At the 2018 Chisenhale Gallery, Ourahmane melted a €300 gold chain bought from a young man in Oran into a dental implant in her own jaw, which later became infected
- The 2024 Spike Island show on Britishness, made with Sophia Al-Maria, incorporated Ghislaine Maxwell's old curtains retrieved from a bin during pandemic clearing of her London mews house
Why it matters: The Venice show crystallises Ourahmane's anti-extractivist method — a pier serving the Poveglia cooperative, and a coin-slot that reframes museum access as a transaction. By importing 1.3 tonnes of Venetian hotel bedlinen and a working church light apparatus, she makes the city's hidden labour the medium itself, inverting how art-world spectacle typically displaces the locals who enable it.
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