LISTE ART FAIR 2025

In the works presented with Livie Gallery at Liste Art Fair, Roman Selim Khereddine turns his lens towards the staging of animal bodies within systems of spectacle, discipline, and decline. Filmed at two fading racetracks in Great Britain and the US – one for greyhounds, the other for horses – the silent video installation SIXES follows animals wearing the number six as they are led to the start: greyhounds fitted into traps, thoroughbreds coaxed into metal stalls. Stripped of commentary, these scenes focus on the fleeting and uncomfortable moments before the release, where anticipation and control converge. The recurring number six becomes an index of interchangeability. Animals are reduced to moving units within a gambling and entertainment machinery, monetized bodies caught in loops of performance. Their function is transactional, their value temporary. The video installation mirrors this cyclical structure: short, soundless loops that echo the rhythm of race days, where events last mere minutes and are followed by long pauses of recalibration – resetting the track, readying the bodies. The focus lies not on the race itself, but on the charged lull between display and execution: the moment after the parade, when animals have been shown and assessed, and bettors fix their gaze in anticipation of returns. It is a choreography of repetition, a theatre of readiness, in which living beings are primed again and again for brief, high-stakes bursts of value. The photogravure series Classical Conditioning introduces another layer of historical reflection. Each print reproduces the cover of the Italian edition of Ivan Pavlov’s Conditioned Reflexes, a foundational text in behavioral science, which laid the groundwork for understanding learned obedience and involuntary responses. By isolating and repeating this image, Khereddine draws a parallel between scientific inquiry and the training regimens that shape animal behavior for human purposes.

Echoes of restraint, repetition, and performance resonate throughout the video installation, the photogravure series, and broader themes in Khereddine’s practice. His installations often unsettle by implicating institutional, cultural, or spatial histories of exploitation, whether by tasking a police dog to perform drills in a municipal art space or by unpacking the legacy of a national circus. Across video, printmaking, and installation, Khereddine confronts the viewer with systems we may prefer to ignore, asking not just how power operates, but on whose back.

— Marlene Marti Bürgi

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