EVENT: YANNIS MOHAND BRIKI (SEPTEMBER 26—OCTOBER 9 2025)
THE INSUFFERABLE WEIGHT OF BEING A FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLD MURDERER
digital video, color, sound, 17’ 54”, 2025, France
created by Yannis Mohand Briki
September 26—October 9 2025
VRAL
THE INSUFFERABLE WEIGHT OF BEING A FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLD MURDERER is the second chapter in what the artist calls a coming of (r)age triptych, an ongoing machinima cycle that uses The Sims 2 as both set and script to trouble the sentimental architecture of the coming-of-age story. If YESTERDAY WAS MY BIRTHDAY SO I ASKED FOR LEGS TO RUN AWAY mapped the precarious terrain of childhood, here the focus tilts to adolescence as a phase less about arrival than collapse: a volatile interregnum marked by disavowal, psychic fracture, and symbolic violence. Within Will Wright’s pliable suburban sandbox — a space designed to accommodate every life stage as a modular fantasy — Briki scripts adolescence not as linear ascent but as systemic undoing. The title’s invocation of murder reads as allegory: to pass through this threshold, something must be eliminated: the imaginary friend, the inherited projection, the residual faith in adult authority. The machinima renders this extinguishing with a cool, almost forensic detachment, as if adolescence were less a personal metamorphosis than a sanctioned erasure, enacted within the algorithmic boundaries of a game that promises infinite possibility yet circumscribes every gesture.
Yannis Mohand Briki is a Paris-based artist and filmmaker whose work navigates the porous boundaries between reality and virtuality through cinematic forms. A graduate of the École Nationale Supérieure d’Arts de Paris-Cergy (ENSAPC) in 2022, Briki is also a member of the Distraction Collective, a Paris-based group of artists and designers investigating consciousness and contemporary imaginaries via real-time technologies and video games. Briki’s films often follow solitary figures adrift in mental and digital landscapes: characters suspended in the shifting terrain of memory, haunted by the pull of nostalgia and the threat of oblivion. His practice engages the liminal space between sanity and madness, love and loss, charting how psychological traces imprint themselves across simulated environments. By situating intimate, often fragmentary narratives within broader mythological frameworks, Briki transforms recollection into a spectral, immersive experience, where personal history becomes entangled with collective dreams and digital afterimages.