Aurélie Sorriaux
In Search of my Curls
4 January - 10 January 2021



The body of work is about the heritage and the question of ourselves.

A research into what is passed on in the family, what remains from our origin and how to identify with it. Being the only one in my family to have curly hair, I started to question my identity.

Nowadays, we are facing a universal question of our origin, searching for an answer about our roots. Contrary to the common preconception we all are a mix of nationalities. This raise the question of identity: what I am? I am my nationality or my DNA? I am what my ancestors were and thus, who were they? Looking at her personal approach takes the viewer back to his own history.

Aurélie Sorriaux investigated her family archives and the memories of her relatives to find answers. Her project tells the difficulty of not finding what she was looking for. An unsuccessful research through archives, DNA tests and involving her close family members. All of these didn’t gave her the answer she was looking for, only the fact that its not where one should conduct research. The work is a collection of different areas of research, non-exclusive.

Aurélie Sorriaux wrote a list of questions she would have liked to ask to her ancestors and gave them to her parents. The questions are an attempt to be close to her ancestors, and an idea of how they would respond. From this, she wrote fictional stories, fictional exchange with her ancestors: what would they had pass on her. Obviously, this isn’t true, it could have been written in a lot of different versions. What is veridical is that the transmission is done by close relatives and that is often the only source of knowledge, the rest is in the imagination.The question of identity is inherent in any search for origin.

Genealogists tend to find similarities and hereditary traits. As a genealogist, Aurélie seek to explain something on the basis of verified data and thus strengthen her identity.

Aurélie Sorriaux (b. 1994, France) is a visual artist and graduated with a BA in Photography from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie (Amsterdam, The Netherlands).

Her photographic approach leans towards the trace as a mark of existence, memory and experience. She examines the heritage and the question of ourselves. In her recent work ‘In Search of my Curls’ she looks at what remains within the family and how to identify to it. She always look to improve her knowledge about photography history, art history and literature.

As part of her graduation show, Aurélie Sorriaux work has been exhibited at the FOAM Museum in Amsterdam in 2020. Also, she has been part of collective shows in France and The Netherlands. Recently her work has been selected to be part of GUP New Talents 2021.