Soufiane Bensabra and Three Angels in Paris

Soufiane Bensabra walks with a spring at his heels. A cupid lingers around his lips when he smiles, who refuses to roost anywhere else. Ask him to pose for a photograph, he looks elsewhere; you insist him to look at your camera, then his cheeks go red. His shiny eyes with dense eyelashes are always half open. He is a dreamer; he dreams big and while chatting up with him, you realize that this young man of twenty seven has the mettle in him to make his dreams real. He is handsome with killer looks. His neat cut clothes frame his six feet lanky figure gorgeously. Soufiane Bensabra loves India and Indian contemporary art. Oh yes…I forgot to tell you. He is an art dealer from Paris and the facts and figures (of both aesthetics and market) of Indian contemporary art are in his finger tips.

Soufiane Bensabra

Call him an art dealer, he would suddenly look into your eyes and say, No. “I am not an art dealer. I am a curator, a gallerist, an art market player, an art collector and of course, you can say that I am all these rolled up into one. And I want to go beyond all these and do something that none has done in the art scene so far.” You tend to ask, what is that ‘something’? Lighting another cigarette, he laughs from the driving seat of his small Mercedes. “I am figuring it out slowly,” says Soufiane while waving at those Parisian beauties passing by the sidewalks. Now you too are distracted. In Parisian summer you can do nothing but get distracted by the beautiful girls. “Why don’t they put on weight like the Indian girls?” Manish Sharma, my artist friend exclaims from the backseat, still unable to dissuade his eyes from the leggy beauties. We drive through a thin line that demarcates the zones of pure admiration and absolute lechery.

First time I met Soufiane in artist Chintan Upadhyay’s residence, almost a year back. Now he is the curator of Chintan’s ‘New Indians’ solo show at Galerie Natalie Seroussi, Paris. Even before Soufiane became the curator of Chintan, he had befriended many of the Indian contemporary artists including Bose Krishnamachari, Jitish Kallat, Riyas Komu, Shilpa Gupta, Anita Dube, Subodh Gupta, Bharati Kher and so on. I am curious to know why this young man is interested in Indian contemporary art. “I was introduced to Indian art by the Indian artists living in Paris, namely V.Viswanathan, Akkitham Narayanan, S.H.Raza, Sohan Kadri and so on. Soon I found India is the most happening place in the art world. I did a good ground work and landed up in Mumbai in 2007,” he recalls.

Aesthetic inclination, youthful energy and ambitious dreams, when strategically mixed with business acumen, would definitely produce a Soufiane. “Johny likes white girls,” comments Chintan from the front seat. “Yes, because I feel that I should know those ‘bodies’ that ruled us for ages,” I explain halfheartedly as my thoughts linger around Soufiane’s entry into Indian contemporary art. “I too like white girls,” says Soufiane, “because I am not white,” Soufiane’s gleeful mood changes with his words, and a strange silence fills in the car. “I am of course French, a true Parisian as I am born and brought up here.” Somehow, the silence that engulfed us a few moments back refuses to budge.

Soufiane comes from a family of migrants; son of a Moroccan mother and an Algerian father. Business brought his father to Paris where he met his mother. Soufiane was born in 1981 in Saint Ouven, a suburban town in Paris. He had a normal Parisian education. “Perhaps I learned a lot from life rather than from schools. I was crazy and was always on the move. I studied English and Economics in college and after graduation, at the age of 21 I joined Alen, a dealer in Antiques and Handicrafts.” Alen, whose surname Soufiane does not remember (everyone knows Alen, says Soufiane) was crazier than what the young apprentice could imagine. He worked with Alen for around eight months and decided to quit. “He sent me crazy,” sipping a glass of champagne Soufiane laughs. We are at all loss to decide who could have sent the other crazy. Now, things fall in place; Soufiane cannot be white but he can be a crazy Parisian. While working with Alen, Soufiane had already imbibed the rules of art market. He studied international art market closely, worked with a few galleries and participated in a few auctions, until he found the gallerist Natalie Seroussi, a rich entrepreneur of Jewish lineage. Since 2006, Soufiane is the curator-consultant for Galerie Natalie Seroussi.

We go to Buddha Bar, one of the most fashionable nightclubs in Paris. “I am enjoying the nightlife in Paris after ages. These days I don’t get time to do all these as I am traveling all over the world, searching for potential artists to showcase in France. I am happy that you are here.” Soufiane parks his car in a place that almost looks like a Tow away zone. Experience for a week has taught us that Soufiane is afraid of Police. “Look, everywhere you can see these Police guys. I hate them.” We look around and find no police personal. But Soufiane is a Parisian and he has a natural instinct to smell them out. I imagine Indian cities. There are policemen around. But like Tracy Chapman sings, “Its good to call the police/Always come late/If they come at all.” Indian mainstream films testify this late coming.

A ten feet tall statue of Lord Buddha presides the nightlife in Buddha Bar. Girls and boys groove to the DJ’s music. Beer costs a bomb. And especially when you are in a look out for ‘company’ your wallet should be stuffed. Manish catches the sight of young and dashing black young men dancing with white girls. “Here everyone seems to get a girl. Why we don’t?” Manish is morally agitated. “Look Manish I have not managed one. So cheer up,” I shout into Manish’s ear. We don’t have much time to waste. Soufiane takes us to Queens Club, another famous night joint in Paris. Soufiane smells Police around. Before I could make out what is going on, he shoves the ‘joint’ that we were smoking, into my hand. He is tricky like a goblin. He doesn’t want to get caught while smoking weed. While negotiating a sharp curve, he yells at another motorist. We notice, on a daily basis, Soufiane gets more ‘middle fingers up’ than anyone else in the streets of Paris. You need to wear a life jacket when he is at wheels. In a silent aside, Chintan asks Soufiane, “Why don’t they have Jesus Bars?”

Entrance of Queens Club gives us hope. Today we are going to be lucky. A discotheque that reminds you of the set of any Bollywood item number, welcomes us. Music. Boys with overgrown muscles and rolled up sleeves, guys with feminine looks dance. I find a few girls, dancing alone. They must need company, I think. “Don’t even dare,” reading my thoughts Soufiane says. In Queens Bar, it is a ‘gay day.’ The girls dancing alone there are waiting for their ‘girls.’ Soufiane cannot control his laugh. We all head towards his car, crestfallen. “Let’s us go to forest,” announces Chintan. Visiting forest has become a nightly routine for us by this time.

What Chintan fondly calls forest is a five kilometer stretch of main road from the Arch of Triumph to one of the posh suburbs in Paris. It reminds you of a ridge area in any city. ‘Forest’ is a regular haunt of ‘she males’; males who exactly look like women. When the night falls, the she males, both white and black ones, most of them Latin American migrants as Soufiane tells us, come there and stand along both sides of the road soliciting clients. They are sex workers. Some of them are transsexuals, some of them transvestites and a few of them punks. They wear skimpy clothes exposing their booties and stand provokingly there. They excel the normal women in appearance and beauty; with heavy duty assets. It is a commercial trade and they are given protection by the Police and the state approves of this flesh trade in the city of love. Pay forty euros, they take you inside the forest and give you a clean job. “They take hormone treatment and do silicone implants to enlarge the body parts,” informs Soufiane. Interested? “No”, we say in chorus.

Soufiane is impulsive in nature. “Let’s us do it” is his mantra, which has helped him to make connections with the artists from all over the world. “What do you think about Indian art and Indian art market?” I ask him. He looks different and serious when he answers a professional question. “Indian art has a lot of potential which has not yet been tapped. We have recognized this fact and we are supporting Indian art market. Perhaps, more than you know, we have got all the data and details of Indian art with us. We want to make it happen and we want to grow and go to places with Indian art market,” he says. I wanted to ask him, who are ‘we’? But the answer is there in his statement; the western art galleries, promoters, dealers, museums, institutions and funding agencies together make this ‘we’.

Indian contemporary artists like Anita Dube, Shilpa Gupta, Chintan Upadhya and so on work with Soufiane. Many still have reservations with this dynamic young man as he is aggressive in his dealings. “I don’t mind that,” Soufiane says, “those who have not yet started working with me would work with me sooner or later as I am not only a dealer and curator but a serious collector too. I have collected a good number of works from a good number of Indian contemporary artists.” Where does the money come from? “I do good art dealings and I make good money that I use for buying good art,” Soufiane’s answer is definite and clear.

One of the paintings from Chintan’s ‘New Indian’ series is placed at the ten by ten glass wall of Galerie Natalie Seroussi, facing the street. The painting is seen from all the street corners. Soufiane takes us in his car through the winding allies of Rue de Siene, where the gallery is located, only to reach the gallery. We wonder why. “I love to see this painting from different streets and feel how people would see it from different distances,” he chuckles. He has this craziness. And his craziness has a method in it for he promotes his artists in the international platforms, places them in good collections and auctions.

Moulin Rouge is half an hour drive from the city centre. Soufiane takes us there. Live shows, peep shows, sex shops, curio shops; everything is there. You would like to browse, yet you prefer not to shop, for anything you buy from here couldn’t be gifted to anyone without nurturing naughty thoughts. With unwilling partners back home you can’t have those things for private use either. However, what you have seen in the virtual world looks quite real in these shops. We don’t shop. But Soufiane does. He buys two packets of ‘some game’. Back in car he opens one packet. He suddenly pushes it into my hands with a ‘you see it’ face. I see it. It is a game that you can play with your partner; a kind of card game. You take a card which has a question (no porn pictures but cards with instructions written in four languages) and your partner chooses another from the stack. When she/he gets the right answer, you have to perform it on his/her body. Tedious and boring than a scrabble game. Who is going to wait to study recipe in detail when the food is served?

It is time to say good bye. Soufiane says good bye to us. Suddenly he gives one of those packets to Chintan. “It is a gift from me,” he says while roaring with laughter. Chintan looks at it. I don’t know whether he has taken it back home or not. But the gesture was interesting. And I love Soufiane for his personality. He deconstructs the image of a traditional art dealer and curator with pinstriped suits and ignorance coated with arrogance and fake friendliness. Soufiane is real; real like you and me, the laughing, weeping, police-fearing ordinary citizens.