What is particularly impressive in Koraïchi's work is the wide variety of media in which he creates and exhibits his articulate and thought-provoking installations. These include fine mixes of ceramics, textiles, poetry, calligraphy, metalwork and paint. A graduate of the Ecole des Beaux Arts in both Algiers and Paris, Koraïchi is the consummate contemporary artist, whose work, though anchored in the Sufi mystical tradition in which he was raised, effortlessly encompasses a contemporary style that communicates themes of universal relevance to a broad cosmopolitan audience. As well as having exhibited in the 47th and 49th Venice Biennales, his works are collected in; major institutions around the world, including the British Museum; the Smithsonian Institution; the Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon; the National Gallery, Amman; etc.
The name Koraïchi-a transliteration of the Arabic Quraishi- indicates the artist's descent from one of the oldest and most prestigious of the Arab tribes, and this installation, specially commissioned for the October Gallery, develops a theme relating to the continuity of ancestral lines. The installation consists of a monumental hand-embroidered textile covered with signs, symbols and traditional sayings that recall the ancestral design of the colourful flags that represented each of the Sufi Brotherhoods.
Surrounding this central standard will be 49 individually crafted brass finials - the elaborately ornamented metalwork pieces that would have surmounted each of the flag-bearing poles- and which referenced and further extended the richly symbolic associations of the flags themselves. Unlike national and military flags, however, which can be seen as divisive, this central flag, to Koraïchi, symbolises the hopes and aspirations that unite almost every family, tribe, people or culture, and celebrates a powerful theme of unity and commonality. Though based upon sets of signs and symbols that have particular ancestral associations for Koraïchi, the artist is at pains to point out that such symbols are ultimately-and somewhat surprisingly-common to all. The number seven (and its multiples, forty-nine is seven times seven) is a number charged with numerological significance not just for the Sufi orders alone, but has auspicious connotations for a wide variety of other traditions as well, representing 'perfection' and 'completion' in the Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist and Taoist traditions also.