HappenArt

Mounir Fatmi: heavier than words
Conrads Gallery – Until August 18, 2021 Berlin (Germany)

Mounir Fatmi was born in Tangier, Morocco, in 1970. At the age of four, his family moved to Casablanca. At 17, he traveled to Rome where he studied at the free school of drawing and nude engraving at the Academy of Arts. Then at the Casablanca art school, and finally at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam.

He spent most of his childhood at the Casabarata flea market. One of the poorest neighborhoods in Tangier, where his mother sold children’s clothes. Such an environment produces large amounts of waste and used everyday objects. The artist now considers this childhood as his first form of artistic education. He compares the flea market to a ruined museum. This vision also serves as a metaphor and expresses the essential aspects of his work. Influenced by the idea of lost media and the collapse of industrial and consumer society, he develops a conception of the status of the work of art situated somewhere between Archive and Archeology.

Of Language and of the Machine.

Using materials such as antenna cable. Typewriters and VHS tapes. Mounir Fatmi develops an experimental archeology that questions the world and the role of the artist in a society in crisis. He diverts its codes and precepts through the prism of a trinity made up of Architecture. Of Language and of the Machine. Thus, he questions the limits of memory, language and communication while reflecting on these obsolete materials and their uncertain future. Mounir Fatmi’s artistic research consists of a reflection on the history of technology and its influence on popular culture. Therefore, we can also consider the current work of Mounir Fatmi as future archives in the making. While they represent key moments in our contemporary history, these technical materials also question the transmission of knowledge. The suggestive power of images and criticize the illusory mechanisms that bind us to technology and ideologies.