L’appartement 22, Rabat, Morocco
15 Feb 2017 - 15 Apr 2017
Mustapha Akrim, intervention dans le quartier industriel à Salé, 2017.
L’appartement 22 presents the exhibition JF_JH égalités, co-organized by the curators Karima Boudou and Abdellah Karroum with the collaboration of the artists Soukaina Joual and Mustapha Akrim.
After a research residency at L’appartement 22 (December 25, 2016 – February 10, 2017), the artists invested the exhibition space as a platform to give shape to their ideas, to conduct interventions and produce active artworks in the context of a society in crisis.
Mustapha Akrim uses the first article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The text has been reproduced with a perfect craftsmanship at first, then it was destroyed before being “re-assembled” afterwards. This action is a form of struggle against forgetting, an allegory of contemporary forms of violence as well as to the violence endured by history itself. The final object is installed on displays, alongside a video-performance, in an attempt to remind that equality is indeed a convention between human beings, to contemplate.
Soukaina Joual works on two dimensions of the human body’s representation. The first one is external. She recycles popular images of Adam and Eve (آدم و حواء) in the biblical moment preceding the divine order to leave paradise and descent to earth. The second representation is internal: it reproduces scientific images of the feminine and masculine bodies via a cross section of the feminine and masculine organs. These images are extracted from their original context and amplified visually, in an analytical process which reflects painting as an act of violence.
A part of the exhibition gives an overview of the curatorial work through notes and documentation which reflects the discussions of the curators with the artists, throughout the research process. This work can be directly apprehended in the exhibition space, nearby the table which functions as a connection between the curatorial notes and artist’s proposals.
The exhibition is conceived in a collaborative and evolving spirit, a series of gatherings, with curators and artists, will take place throughout the exhibition to enrich the thinking process on the issues raised by the project.
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