It was never really that good

In a deliberate mistranslation of a line from Nino Ferrer's 1975 hit song Le Sud, the title of Basma al-Sharif's solo exhibition at soft power transforms the melancholy over a lost paradise sung about in the song into a political refusal of nostalgic forgetting: It was actually never particularly good. In two video installations, the exhibition shows how both integration policy and neo-colonial promises of progress function as tools of ideological conformity, tying social belonging to conditions. Al-Sharif's mistranslation encourages us to look behind the soothing facades of supposed places of refuge and to recognise in them the dangerous choreographies of displacement.