Marseille and Aix-en-Provence
Ix Dartayre
Mes Sœurs — La Relève 8
2026
January 29 at 18:00
Le Couvent
Arts visuels
Free entrance
Sound composition by THELIA
A co-production by Parallèle, art-cade*, Le Couvent/Juxtapoz, and Sud Side. With the support of the DRAC PACA through the Culture Pro program, the Région Sud through the Carte Blanche aux Artistes – Visual Arts program, and the Fondation de France.
Exhibition
January 29 – February 21, 2026
Open Tuesday to Saturday, free admission, 10:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.
Thursday, January 29, 6:00 p.m.
Opening and DJ set by Girlfriend
Collective activation
Sunday, February 15, 2026
2:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m.
New in this edition of La Relève 8: art-cade*, Le Couvent/Juxtapoz, Sud Side, and Parallèle are joining forces to support the winning artist, Ix Dartayre, in producing and creating an in situ work within the Chapelle Noire of Le Couvent.
Blending photography, assemblage of collected elements, writing, installation, and performance, Ix Dartayre is a multifaceted artist who explores the sensitive relationships between images, bodies, and spaces, paying particular attention to the gestures and presences she invokes. Her installations thus become vectors of memory, intimacy, and connection, opening onto narratives that are both personal and collective.
With Mes sœurs, the artist develops, at the heart of the Black Chapel, a project that brings transfeminine narratives into resonance with the site’s spiritual history.
The title refers both to the term “sisters” used within the transfem community—sisters in life, struggle, and transition—and to the nuns who once inhabited the convent. From this dialogue emerge forms in which the intimate and the political, memory and the sacred, are interwoven. Working primarily with installation, image, and sound, the artist seeks to reinscribe voices, objects, and gestures within a space laden with symbolism, which she conceives as a living place—one to be traversed, inhabited, and transformed.
Biographies
Ix Dartayre
Blending photography, assemblages of collected elements, writing, installation, and performance, Ix Dartayre is a multidisciplinary artist who explores sensitive relationships between images, bodies, and spaces, paying particular attention to the gestures and presences she invokes. Her installations thus become vectors of memory, intimacy, and connection, opening onto narratives that are both personal and collective.
Girlfriend
In predominantly bass, break, glitch, slut, trap, and hardcore universes, Girlfriend builds dynamic, euphoric, and mysterious soundscapes. Her mixes, travelling between 110 and 170 BPM, are a true love letter to her sisters. The Dolls to the front, the boys in the back 🐾🎶 (visual attached).
Aïcha Chikh
Aïcha Chikh is an Algerian visual artist and performer whose background combines training in evolutionary and biodiversity sciences in Oran and at the University of Montpellier with studies in fine arts. Her work explores zones of uncertainty between scientific discourse, the body, memory, and migration.
Ava Namen
Ava Namen is a Brazilian tarot reader and interdisciplinary artist based in Marseille. Her practice unfolds within an oracular space, between subtle and immaterial constellations, through the creation and assemblage of objects in relation to space and the body.
Laju Bourgain
Laju Bourgain is a performer and DJ (Miss Joli Butt Kunt). Through dance, writing, and participatory works, they tell stories of entering trance states, community celebrations, and collective quests.
Leïa de Guibert
Leïa de Guibert is a Marseille-based writer and artist. Her texts, infused with transness and faith, explore metamorphosis, the living world, grief, and the materials of the world. Elements hybridize and shift in a form of writing that is at once poetic, mystical, and erotic.
Nuria Mokhtar
Nuria Mokhtar is an artist and writer. She is interested in the ways marginalized and minoritized bodies are treated, and in the question of violence within both political and intimate contexts.
Prudence
Prudence is the side project of the DJ Girlfriend. This alter ego was born from a desire for gentle creation, carried by heavy ambient layers through which music and lamentations weave. In searching for God in solitude, Prudence loses herself in sound, drifting at the heart of cyborg and earthy landscapes.
Sasha Ariel
Sasha Ariel is a multidisciplinary artist for whom writing is a central material. Their research explores the connections between sexual identity, gender identity, and class identity. Through precarious installations and performances conceived as processes in transformation, their work privileges becoming over fixed form. Rooted in a collective dynamic, their practice claims a queer and proletarian art, between brutality and softness, giving visibility to marginalized realities.