Gallery: Postcard From Marrakech: A Conflicted Photo Festival
01Skirt by Gazelle Samizay
MARRAKECH, Morroco -- Located in Marrakech's luxury hotel district, the Palace Es Saadi is a walled and guarded complex with lush grounds and elaborately tiled fountains. It’s also one of the two venues housing the Marrakech Art Fair, where this year organizers called for submissions of work with a “protest aesthetic” - not surprising considering the post-Arab Spring political landscape. The district, a little island of everywhere afloat in a thousand-year-old city, ends a few blocks away. A French-built branch of the Bank of Morocco (now a venue for cultural events) sits on Jamaa el Fna square - a plaza so bustling that it is easy to walk by a snake charmer without knowing it. This defunct bank houses the showcase exhibition of this year's Fair - *Images Affranchies*, or *Liberated Images*. The question of whether there is an emerging artistic movement in the Arab world, or whether the elite of the diaspora have simply become better at competing on the international exhibition circuit was a central concern of the various round-table discussions held alongside the galleries in the Es Saadi complex. The resumes of most of the artists present are filled with formal studies in Strasbourg, long years exhibiting in Paris, partnerships with galleries in Mexico, Japan, and New York. The exhibitors are multilingual, camera-ready, and have assistants and complicated business cards - the qualities one would expect from any successful contemporary artist. At the art fair’s opening soiree, women wearing gowns with plunging backs stride alongside leonine Sir Richard Branson look-alikes in linen suits. They stream between the fountains, foyer and courtyard, past a portrait of King Mohammed VI. A woman carrying a designer dog looks uncertain the dog is allowed. Caterers cut nova lox and place the pieces on trays in rolls, alongside flaky pastries, succulent beef and champagne. The *Images Affranchies* exhibition - curated by former director of the Arab World Institute, Brahim Alaoui - collects work completed by Arab artists between the years 2006-2010. The demonstrations and revolts in the Arab world have given a new context and relevance to the collection, but one has apprehensions that a visual art exhibition featuring work done in a “protest aesthetic,” funded in part by the government of France, will have pat politics and punch-pulling products. Will the high-concept frame be emotionally resonant, or will the work appear too made-to-order, an effort by slick expats with MFAs to profit from the turmoil in their home countries? *Story continued on next page.* *__Above:__ "Skirt" by Gazelle Samizay*
02Zitten
On the roof of the old bank, a man talks on his cell phone and smokes a cigarette while looking out over Jamaa el Fna in late afternoon. The three minarets surrounding the square will soon sound the call to prayer. In front of the gallery, a diapered Barbary ape on a leash drinks from a dog dish, spitting distance from a Club Med. Issue art of the kind on offer straddles the worlds of art and politics - two realms where a lot of hay is made by potshot criticism, but the video piece “[Le souffle du récitant comme signe](”http://traces-du-sacre.centrepompidou.fr/exposition/oeuvres_exposees.php?id=34”)” (The Breath of the Narrative as a Sign) by Yazid Oulab is abstract in a way that resists easy analysis or connection to politics. Four thin lines of smoke streaming upwards with slight undulations. The audio contains repetitive chanting with the occasional chime of a bell and, sealed in the dark rooftop room, the effect is hypnotic. Another video artist, Adel Abidini, is from Iraq but currently living in Finland. He's energetic and nervy - uncomfortable in front of an audience. He apologizes for not being much of a talker, and tries to convey his feelings about exhibiting in the Iraq pavilion at this year's Biennale in Venice, rather than that of his adopted Finland. “I thought it was a joke,” Abidini said of the initial invitations, which he ignored. Abidini has not returned to Iraq in several years, but to him, responding to events seen at a distance, documented by others, does not present any unusual artistic challenge. “All artistic product starts with a concept you have inside yourself,” he says. He runs a hand through his short salt and pepper hair, and extends an arm from tense, rounded shoulders to drop his cigarette into a nearby cup of coffee. He attempts a metaphor about helping a woman pick out clothes. The gist is that art has to be personal. *__Above:__ "Zitten" (left) and "Otabenga" by Jasper de Beijer*
03Number 1 (left) and number 7 of Série Etoffes cutanées by Meriem Bouderbala
Meriem Bouderbala, an artist from Tunisia who received formal training in Aix-en-Provence, France, has the air of a woman on a mission. She can talk with intense seriousness while shooting winning smiles over her listener’s shoulder. Her c-print images (above) are sometimes nude studies in negative, like x-rays through a jelaba, and sometimes surreal inversions of form and perspective. Though the so-called Arab Spring started in Tunisia, Bouderbala says she has not responded directly to those events in her work but does hold strong feelings about her homeland. “Tunisia was taken hostage by a dictatorship for over twenty years. It was no longer our country but a country of thieves,” she said. After years of living in France, she became “sick of Europe,” but found a welcoming attitude toward creativity there that she wanted to bring home. Bouderbala's worries about resistance to her recently-opened gallery in Tunisia - which features an exhibition containing nudity and opened during Ramadan - were unfounded. She encountered instead a workable indifference. “There was no support. No support at all,” she said, referring to the Tunisian government. She found other avenues of funding and advocacy, such as the Embassy of France and private donors. Lack of institutional support at the national level can be as effective as outright censorship. Artistic conversation between Arab countries has lagged as a result of art buyers who prefer to purchase domestic work - even as artists continue to strike out for US and European markets. Alaoui, the event's organizer and a Morroco native, notes that developments such as Dubai's growing market has offered Arab artists new “means of communication and mobility,” but the reality of a pan-Arab art world remains elusive - which is partly why he conceived of the festival last year. *__Above:__ Number 1 (left) and number 7 of* Série Etoffes cutanées *by Meriem Bouderbala*
04Seahawk Search & Rescue Helicopter Without Folding Parts (left) and Rusting of Tugboat Smit Houston by Kerem Ozan Bayraktar
As one of the Fair's round table discussions winds down, a charismatic man with thick eyebrows and perfect self-confidence says into a microphone that has been handed to him, “I'm Egyptian, and I'm confused … What does this art have to do with revolution?” It is an awkward moment and the moderator hastens to gracefully right the listing ship, “If we refer to the dictionary, we would see that revolution means to end something old and begin something new, so you might say we are now back at the beginning.” There is light laughter, and people begin to leave, but the Egyptian, Yaser Askar, a gallery owner, is still holding the microphone. “I just think that art is art and it has nothing to do with revolution.” The laughter has stopped and people keep leaving. Askar later elaborates on his room-killing comments. “Everyone who was there in Cairo has cell-phone pictures, or video, but you can't express what happened there. Maybe later, but not now,” Askar said, echoing the statements of several artists who said they would need time to digest what happened this year. He was present for the deposition of the executive in Egypt and sees political developments in that country as only positive. “You have to understand, that before, there was not censorship, but corruption. You could say anything, show anything. You could have nudity. But you didn't know who was on the juries that selected work. Artists that supported the regime would do very well,” he said. Askar's Ward Culture and Art Center is dedicated to showing Egyptian art outside of Egypt. His goal is to increase the number of stops on the world art circuit, and to provide more regional access points for Arab art. He is as interested in taking his artists to Korea as he is to the United States, and while he himself is deeply political, he dismisses the ways that exhibition organizers have linked artists' work to political events. “The artists in Egypt were not the revolution; this is just a reflection of Western media. It is what they want to see. Look at this exhibition. People are drinking wine, everything is in French and English … What does this have to do with the Middle East?” *__Above:__ "Seahawk Search & Rescue Helicopter Without Folding Parts" (left) and "Rusting of Tugboat Smit Houston" by Kerem Ozan Bayraktar*
Marco Barbon05From the series Casablanca by Marco Barbon
Wandering through the exhibition halls at Es Saadi, it’s apparent that the independent galleries have accomplished more through self-selection than has Alaoui through his thematically labored curating of *Images Affranchies*. The work in this portion of the Fair is not at all limited to the issues that define the region for outsiders - such as armed conflict or human rights – but rather addresses issues common to the place-less international zeitgeist: dislocation, memory, ways of relating to the body. Marco Barbon's use of Polaroids achieves an Edward Hopper-like ghostliness and verisimilitude, while Mehdi-Georges Lahlou's images are defined by gender-bending whimsy. Kezban Arca Batibeki's 2008, “Play it Again Sam!” places digital cutouts from *Casablanca* in warped perspective, in front of a disconcertingly lo-res background, observed by an incongruously modern sprite - creating a nauseous nostalgia. Murat Germen's 2010 photo “Muta-Morfoz/Cairo” is a colorful apartment building that blockily wavers like the digital whine of a dropped cell phone call. In his work “stasis,” Kerem Ozan Bayraktar places models of broken trains, ships, and helicopters in gray voids, a reflection, he says, of the feelings of trapped homesickness he experienced while studying abroad. The work displayed throughout the exhibition is more muted than what might be expected to come from one of the world's most rapidly changing regions. Askar's gallery, for instance, displayed nothing more controversial than a still life painting of a vase of flowers and some abstract sculptures. While the context could be said to be Arab, with few exceptions this is not an essential component of the works. *From the series* Casablanca *by Marco Barbon*
06Boujmal-Sihéme by Nicéne Kosontini
07Autoportrait a la Pasteque by Mehdi Georges Lahlou
*"Autoportrait a la Pasteque" by Mehdi Georges Lahlou*
08Muta Morphosis No. 2 by Murat Germen
*"Muta Morphosis No. 2" by Murat Germen*
09Muta Morphosis No. 3 by Murat Germen
*"Muta Morphosis No. 3" by Murat Germen*
10Untitled by Sama Alshaibi
*Untitled by Sama Alshaibi*
