The Age of Consequences

Officine dell'Immagine, Milan

May 13 - July 30, 2021

 

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From 13 May to 30 July 2021, Officine dell'Immagine in Milan will be hosting the second solo show of mounir fatmi (Tangier, Morocco, 1970), one of the most prestigious voices of contemporary art. Curated by Silvia Cirelli, the exhibition brings together a selection of the most significant works of this great interpreter, paying tribute to his long and consolidated career. 

 

Already well-known internationally and certainly one of the leading figures on today's art scene, mounir fatmi is among the highlights of the current "Moroccan Trilogy" exhibition at the Museo Nacional de Arte Moderno Reina Sofia in Madrid, the group show "Memory of Defence" at the Es Baluard Museum in Palma, the "Icons" exhibition at the Boghossian Foundation in Brussels, and "The Slipstream" exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. He will be also among the artists of the next Casablanca Biennale and of the Biennale d'art contemporain Hybride in Lens. 

 

Called upon to exhibit in prestigious museums such as the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, or the MAXXI in Rome, his works are also to be found in major public collections, including those of the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the Louvre Abu Dhabi; the Fondation Louis Vuitton pour la création, Paris; the Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf; the Mathaf Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha; and the Brooklyn Museum, New York. 

 

Always a witness to the complex socio-cultural fabric of contemporary life, fatmi stands out thanks to his stylistic approach capable of relating to highly topical issues such as identity, multiculturalism, the ambiguities of language and the importance of communication as a social thermometer of human developments. 

 

Using performative and participatory experiences, the artist brings the narrative back to the mechanisms of communication understood as cultural stratification, translating the precariousness of a historical moment marked by a sense of vulnerability and collective uprooting. 

The exhibition offers the opportunity for a wide-ranging insight into the poetics of mounir fatmi, highlighting his great lexical ability, exploring stylistic languages ranging from installation to sculpture, from drawing to photography. 

 

In works such as La Pietà from 2007 and Everything Behind Me from 2018, the choice of the material used is a central focus, with long white antenna cables, a mode of expression that the artist has been developing since 1998. Known for their use in transmitting data, whether images, words or audio, 

cables are the emblem par excellence of connection, of transmissibility between people and things. And it is because of this function of sharing and dissemination that fatmi enhances their communicative dynamics. The interest in an everyday object, which is then decontextualised, losing its primary function to become an artistic message, returns with the work Already Dead of 2021, where the familiar VHS videotape is transformed into an imposing immersive installation that leaves the viewer feeling lost and disoriented. This perception is also echoed in the work Oil, Oil, Oil, Oil Suspended of 2019, in which the artist questions the problem of insufficient energy resources and the resulting economic tensions. 

 

The Milanese exhibition closes with the works Heavier than words (2020), Coma, Manifesto (2018) and Calligraphy of the Unknown (a series that continues from 2014), in which fatmi focuses on a recurring theme in his expressive parable: the power of language and its fascinating indecipherability. Highlighting the value of communication, as a fundamental collective experience, the artist nevertheless measures its failures, steering the narrative towards misunderstandings and the ambivalence of an obligatory precariousness, certainly complex and at times twisted, but all the same a synthesis of an authentic emotional landscape. 

 

Officine dell’Immagine, May 2021