Youssef Taki presents Al filo de la imagen – At the Image’s Edge, the artist’s first retrospective exhibition at AWL Gallery in Girona.

The exhibition unfolds as a journey through migrant memory as a fragile territory, shaped by displacement, loss, and processes of rewriting and self-representation. It is grounded in the idea that migration entails exceeding a prior frame in order to inhabit an uncertain space, where the body and memory become active archives. Within this transition, images cease to function as mere records and instead operate as devices that shape, condition, and often exclude communities within visual regimes.

From this premise, the exhibition shifts attention toward the mechanisms that regulate visibility. The act of framing—choosing, delimiting, interpreting—emerges as an operation charged with political implications: every image entails an exclusion. By putting pressure on the frame and directing the gaze toward its edges, the exhibition challenges hegemonic narratives that have fixed the migrant experience from external, statistical, or colonial perspectives, restoring complexity to stories reduced to abstract categories.

The recovery and reactivation of family and digital archives occupies a central place in this process. Through family albums, vernacular documents, and materials rescued from oblivion, memory is reassembled as a cartography of fragments. These images, marked by time and the fragility of their supports, embody traces of lives shaped by uprooting and the construction of new senses of belonging. By situating the narrative in the first person, the exhibition shifts from “speaking about” to “speaking from,” asserting the right to exist and to leave a trace beyond transit.

At the same time, the materiality of the image becomes a field of experimentation. The printed surface ceases to be a stable boundary: the image passes through the paper, illuminates, filters, distorts, and appears on the reverse as a residue or echo, revealing that all representation is permeable and that the invisible is constitutive of the visible. This formal overflow reinforces the idea that memory and the formation of subjectivities are capable of dismantling visual and media hegemony.

Taken together, the exhibition proposes a reflection on the dignity of migrant memories and on the need to dismantle the illusion of the image’s totality. By inhabiting margins and fissures, the works create a space where memory, history, and photographic matter are placed in tension and interrogate one another, opening the way to singular, fully realized forms of life that resist all simplification.