INTENSION exhibition
GVCC CASABLANCA May 11 - June 4 2016 Younes Atbane, Younes Baba-Ali Nidhal Chamekh, Fakhri El Ghezal Simohammed Fettaka, Malek Gnaoui Wiame Haddad, ismaël, Youssef Ouchra Haythem Zakaria.
INTENSION May 11 - June 4 2016 MASNAÂ # 4 GVCC
As part of MASNAÂ # 4, the exhibit INTENSION is bringing together the works of ten Tunisian and Moroccan artists living in the Maghreb or in Europe, sometimes between the two, all of them born in the 1980s. Their works, which are met today with international recognition, have in common, beyond each work’s uniqueness, a certain relationship with the intensity of art, with its autonomy and with its critical force. In philosophy, intension is the proper definition of a thing, of its concept. In physics, the term designates a phenomenon of intensification. The aim of this exhibit is intension of art. Works by Younes Atbane, Younes Baba-Ali, Nidhal Chamekh, Fakhri El Ghezal, Simohammed Fettaka, Malek Gnaoui, Wiame Haddad, ismaël, Youssef Ouchra, Haythem Zakaria. Commission: ismaël and David Ruffel Catalog design: Younes Atbane With the support of the Fondation Touria and Abdelaziz Tazi, the Institut français du Maroc and the SCAC, the fondation Kamel Lazaar.
Critics
Critics are time running. The world ripped apart by finance and terror. The real lived in virtual mode. Having doubtlessly arrived at the high point of economic, religious and technological tyrannies, this time torn to shreds, the artist patiently patches it together, he sews it back up and remodels it. He gives shape to the shapeless, sense to the senseless and body to the disembodied. If the modern made something beautiful from something ugly, the contemporary assembles into possibles the thousand and one pieces of a shattered world that they say its impossible to put back together, much less back into another world. In that way, the artist is the critic of his times. His fever sets fire to the plains, it moves the decomposing body and makes inflections of sense and non-sense happen in the endless successions of 0s and 1s inside of which imaginations trip over each other. These becomings that he gives shape to begin with the resuscitation of his art. For in the hands of finance, art is also nothing more than a nameless, lifeless pastime. So here’s the rundown. Younes Baba-Ali and Fakhri El Ghezal reinvest in disinvested figures: the tracking shot and the dual exhibit. Two ways of doing things are deployed before our eyes in the force of a proposal. In Maroc de demain (Morocco of Tomorrow), the tracking shot is no longer simply “a moral question�, it is also a poetic question in the the most subversive sense of the term. The end of the video is less an unveiling than a reconstruction of sight, a beyond for the image. If art reflects on the world, it is not a reflection but an endless thinking about it and rethinking about it. Like a dream, the forms and the signs in Chott Maria, accentuated by the black and white and the film grain of another time, function through a blurred movement of traces and their erasure, of reality and its abstraction. The superimposition of bodies, of spaces and of words takes on a ghostlike tonality in the interstices between the rudimentary and the dream. For, in photography, what is a dual exhibit if not to go to a meeting of ghosts, to cross bridge between two images? Just like territories, be they bodily in the work of Wiame Haddad or geographic in the work of Nidhal Chamekh. In his work, Haddad explores the body beneath all of its seams, its postures and its tears. The bodies of political prisoners, of couples, of teenagers, or as it happens here, of his
father. In a square frame, beneath a raw light in a desaturated shade, nude and, one imagines shaking, the body of the father (of which we will only see part of the face) offers itself like earth burnt by the years. The folds of flesh ripple in a gravelly landscape. The last photograph brings him towards a telluric elsewhere. At the rear of the drawings and paintings which preceded it, the series Entre les choses (Between The Things) breaks with the up-to-now bountiful aesthetic of Chamekh, marked by baroque profusion of signs and fragmentary composition of bodies. Shots taken in 2014 in Oujda, on first view, this series staggers with its outline. Aware that, between things there exists nothing more than their absence, the image that, in a single gesture, makes things humiliated in the presence of themselves. Each stone in the mountain and each pore in the skin inventing a territory of borders, an earth and a body prior to language. If these four artists tend towards a concerte, visceral, carnal, and geological formal approach, conversely, Haythem Zakaria in his quest for protocoles flattens language in Alif II and Al-Fatiha, through the beginning of the Semitic alphabet and the Koranic word. The drawings in Alif (arab equivalent of the hebrew Aleph, returning in the kaballah to pure and infinite divinity) attempt, in the style of the character in Borges’s eponymous short story, to access the infinite of the universe through a decisive point in space: a light in the argentine author’s short story and the godlike entity, through both plastic and digital intervention of the 99 names in this work by the Tunisian artist. Spreading the work out between the origins of representation, namely drawing, and the automatism of a computer program, the lines of Alig II and the arid stretch of Al-Fatiha’s letters open up a phenomenological approach in which the work is a singular experience, here also, prior to language. An outstandingly political experience that doesn’t miss its chance to highlight the philosopher Arafat Saâdallah: “This desire, to access the other in a radical path toward the extremity of a language, through its outline and its digital value, brings us to think about the risk of all desire for the other, to call on him and to see him, to conceive of him, which returns to a calculated and perspectivist will. Capitalist fury is perhaps nothing more than that!” In short, the work of Zakaria might be a critique of the theologico-economic.
In their own way, the theologico-political critique of Malek Gnaoui and Simohamed Fettaka takes a more radical position. The two artists reflections are centered upon sheep and shepherds. Gnaoui has worked through the sacrificial and symbolic figure of the bovid for years. Dead meat, self-portrait as a carcass, one of the masterful pieces among the artist’s variations, evokes, through its simple device and its raw realism despite the dazzling whiteness of the work, ancestral violence and hypercontemporary overconsomption, two principle points of this artist’s thought. The ceramic is rubbed patiently as it becomes smooth which contrasts with the universe that it represents, made from barbary and blood. Serendipity would have it that the two artists propose two works that enter into direct resonance with each other: Dhbiha and Chaâb. As it happens, sheepskins in which the arabic words throat-slitting (or sacrifice by way of semantic slippage) and people. Yet it seems that Fettaka’s tone is more ironic. Sheep have just been added to his personal bestiary after, among other animals, pig sin The Skinned and donkeys in Read. The figurines of sheep as well as the djellaba that hang on a cross take part in a re-enchantement of forms and signs. Corrosive detournement is also at work in Younes Atbane and Youssef Ouchra’s creations. Beginning with its title A Work of Contemporary Moroccan Art on a European Platform, Atbane’s complex installation made from drills, flags, sugar cubes, stars and photos, sets the tone. However, this kinetic work takes on a captivating dimension through its juxtaposition of distant realities and elements that are theoretically disparate. Through a ferocious questioning of the alienating mechanics of contemporary art, the tension is born most particularly from reflexive montage relating to the image in movement. The critic is emancipatory or it is nothing at all. Similar additions are found in the work of Ouchra: a beard grafted to a model tank and a quotation from a Sufi thinker carved directly into an oil barrel. Like Gnaoui and Fettaka, the embedding is organic, the material is worked on in flesh. The symbol is defused, circumvented, sending the object of power back to a disused meaning, subverting its oppressive charge through a reinvestment of its form in itself rather than active thought. If, as the artist underlines “I am nothing but the experience of myself”, his work,
in particular his performance, is the experience of elsewhere within oneself and alterity in all things. In this way, Gnaoui, Fettaka, Atabane and Ouchra ask questions of the cult, cultural, intellectual and political origins of oppression by inclusion, rapprochement and convergence of theoretically divergent forms and ideas. A bit like Younès Baba-Ali brings together fantastical images and maragnilized people in Casablanca or Fakhri El Ghezal superimposing onto film two photographs or Hythem Zakaria mixing drawing and software as well as the written form of mathematics or Wiame Haddad unveiling the future of stone to flesh and Nidhal Chamekh unveiling, by contrast, the future of flesh to stone. These introspective movements — stripping bodies, territories, languages, sights and objects of the domination exercised on them by a civilizational progress which it has been hammered into us to take at face value — are neither nostalgic for a certain hypothetical state of nature nor regressive toward a certain primal state of things. On the contrary, they embrace a manifold movement. One of an aesthetic thought that is not of the order of a straight line, but that would take hold of the disorder of concentric circles whose center is the essence of things which continues to intensify until brims over the limits of definitions that one typically gives to them. If intension there is, it is the critical postulate from which artists redefine the unknown in a world destined for the hegemony of the legible, of the namable and of the quantifiable. ismaël Avril 2016
Younes Atbane Younes Baba-Ali Nidhal Chamekh Fakhri El Ghezal Simohammed Fettaka Malek Gnaoui Wiame Haddad ismaĂŤl Youssef Ouchra Haythem Zakaria
YOUNES ATBANE
UNE EXPOSITION D’ART CONTEMPORAIN MAROCAIN DANS UNE PLATEFORME EUROPEENE (AN EXHIBIT OF CONTEMPORARY MOROCCAN ART ON A EUROPEAN PLATFORM)
Installation 2016
Younes Atbane lives and works between Casablanca and Berlin. His artistic practice is centered around a critical and burlesque relationship to the field of art, its actors and its geopolitics. “Une exposition d’art contmeporain marocain dans une plateforme européenne” is a kinetic installation, a fabric that is going to become a flag that is going to become an art, later a dynamic, an identity, a politic, a cinematic work, and finally, a history. The point of departure is an analysis of the field of development of contemporary Moroccan art.
YOUNES BABA-ALI
Maroc de demain (MOROCCO OF TOMORROW) Vidéo 16/9, 3’56’’ 2014
Younes Baba-Ali lives and works between Brussels and Casablanca. His work plays with the codes of monstration of artwork and circumvents them, juxtaposing the question of nature and of the status of the object, a reflection on the relationships sustained between art, its public and institutions, museums. A long tracking shot scans a series of display panels promoting a property redevelopment project in Casablanca. Between documentary and fiction, Maroc de demain proceeds by contrasts and unveils the simulacrum of hyper-capitalism in a Morocco in the thick of urban mutation.
NIDHAL CHAMEKH Entre les choses (BETWEEN THE THINGS) Series of 8 digital photographs in varying formats 2014
Nidhal Chamekh, born in Tunisia, lives and works in Paris. His discourse, largely fragmentary, is not without reminders that the freedom of dadaism grabs hold of all eras and conflates spaces and cultures. One could consider his work like a tool for “sampling” the chaos of history. Entre les choses is a singular facet in his body of work. The nudity of landscapes, the outline of forms, “establishes a distance and the link is opened in the tension that makes the world appear, and that gives us the chance to astonish ourselves for a moment before the being of things.”
FAKHRI EL GHEZAL
Chott Maria / La plage de Marie (MARIE’S BEACH) Series of 20 silver halide photographs Dual exhibit 2014
Chott Maria est composée de visions éclatées de terrains en friches, chantiers à l’arrêt et objets à l’abandon ainsi que de réminiscences personnelles (autoportraits, lieux de vie…). Comme un kaléidoscope en noir et blanc du village où réside le photographe, il s’agit d’un portrait de la ville de Chott Meriem (prononciation arabe de Marie). Fakhri El Ghezal vit et travaille entre Chott Mariem et Tunis. Il développe une œuvre photographique qui travaille le corps de celui qui la travaille, dans une résonnance perpétuelle, dans un incessant va-et-vient entre la mémoire de la chair et la chair de l’image.
SIMOHAMMED FETTAKA
Châab (PEUPLE / PEOPLE) Drawing on sheepskin 100x60 cm 2016
Simohammed Fettaka lives in Casablanca. His work involves multiple artistic fields: film, photography, video, collage, sound art, performance through a distant and subversive approach toward detournment of images. Between sculptures and installations, Penderie du berger (Shepherd’s wardrobe), Châab (peuple / people) and Fadeur form a lucid and ironic reflection on codes and cultural and cult signs.
MALEK GNAOUI
B.S. : Dead meat CĂŠramic 2015
Malek Gnaoui lives and works in Tunis. He often creates ceramics installations (untreated or screen-printed) into which he integrates, light, soundtracks or videos. B.S.: Dead meat, Dead meat moving, Dhbiha and Kill your killer all belong to project Black sheep which focuses on the links between contemporary alienation and ancestral value systems, through a rereading of ceramics and of the figure of the sheep as it is disseminated by religion and popular beliefs.
WIAME HADDAD
Le Père (THE FATHER) Detail Series of 9 digital photographs, 60 cm x 60 cm 2012
Wiame Haddad currently lives and works in Lille. Her work and her reflections focus on questions of the body, between the West and the East. She feeds herself on everything that highlights the ways in which the body expresses a situation of enclosure, of interior conflict or of provoked conflict through a historical or social context, focusing in this way on the body as a signifier of politics. Le Père is a figural and patient study of carnal territory.
ISMAĂ‹L
Diary – Part I (2013 / 2016) Detail 41 silver halide photographs Disposable cameras, 15 x 22.4 cm 2016
ismaĂŤl is a filmmaker, visual artist and author. He lives and works in Tunis. His artistic and theoretical work hinges on an interrogation of the image and its political shaping in a globalized world. His preferred themes are marginality, enclosure, contemporary solitude. A geography of the personal, Diary Part I (2013 / 2016) ponders the volatile movement of bodies in public and private spaces. The work as a whole constitues a reflection on the mutation of bodies in the era of generalized representation through the observation of gestures, postures, looks.
YOUSSEF OUCHRA
Contemporary Cosmogony Detail Drawing on cotton paper, 140 x 130 cm 2016
Youssef Ouchra lives and works in Casablanca. His work is multidiscipinary and involves performance art as well as installation and video. Through a dynamic that is at once collaborative and independent, he explores fields of creation that are extremely varied. His works question the fundamental idea of the human and his relationship to forms. Ma Taaboudoun, Camoufl’age and Contemporary Cosmogony are both subversive propositions of the established order of politics and the established order of ideas.
HAYTHEM ZAKARIA
Al-Fatiha Detail Digital print Algorithm, sura Al Fatiha, 200 x 80 cm 2014-2015
Born in Tunis, Haythem Zakaria lives and works in Paris. His inspirations embrace Sufi thought just as much as subversive visual techniques such as glitch, metaimage or cineprocess. Al-Fatiha and Anamnesis demonstrate the artist’s new aesthetic propositions, oriented towards more material plastics where the absolute quest dissolves into digital and software-based systems. Untitled is an installation composed of 99 pieces of steel that create a form like the tower of Babel.
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