ART-PRESENTATION: Latifa Echakhch

Born in Morocco and raised in France, Latifa Echakhch mines cultural materials as subject matters for her work, to deconstruct and represent everyday objects. She creates sharp-witted installations that challenge cultural assumptions. When looking at the works, the audience is confronted with the traces of an action and with a part of the artist’s personal life.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Nouveau Musée National de Monaco Archive

In her solo exhibition “Le jardin mécanique”, Latifa Echakhch presents a new installation conceived specifically for the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco-Villa Sauber. The exhibition combines references to the development of modern Monte-Carlo – such as the construction of the Opéra Garnier and the gardens of exotic plants, with the artists’ own impressions and childhood memories. Echakhch selected numerous details from the paper set models designed by Alphonse Visconti, the decorator of the Opéra de Monte-Carlo from 1903 to 1924, which she then produced as stage sets. In the exhibition space, she unfolds a landscape as artificial as it is fantasized, composed of fragments of scenery for productions such as Pompeii, Rigoletto, or Masques and Bergamasques, which offer a distant echo to Verlaine’s Fêtes Galantes or to the Méditations Poétiques composed on the shores of Lac du Bourget. The landscape thus recomposed, suspended from the threads of an imaginary theatre machinery, is intimately linked to the tradition of the mechanical automata manufactured in the Parisian workshops in the 19th century. These “salon” toys, whose subjects reflected French colonial history and a new taste for exoticism, inspired a series of videos presented within the mechanical garden created by Latifa Echakhch. The solo exhibition “Falling, lovely and beautiful” with the title freely referring to the Nick Cave song  “As I sat sadly by her side”, is a new set of works by Latifa Echakhch presented in KIOSK. An installation involving bronze bells, a performative video and a series of drawings in ink. For these works, the objects or texts have been stripped of their original meanings and contexts in order to make new interpretations possible. This method is typical for Echakhch’s art practice. The monumental shattered bronze bells under the central dome, are exact replicas of the church bells from the destroyed church Lübeck, a German city bombed in 1942. While the church is now fully restored, the bells are left lying exactly where they hit the ground at the time. While the pieces of fallen bells emphasize silence in terms of stilled notes or muted violence, in the side room piano notes resound amidst huge noise. For this video, Echakhch simultaneously evokes an act of creation and destruction by making someone play the piano while, at the same time, someone else splits the instrument to pieces with a sledgehammer. In a similar way, Echakhch’s series of ink drawings deconstructs Arabic poetry. On sheets of newspaper she transcribed the original texts, but only copying the punctuation or vowels. Traditionally and linguistically though in Arabic poetry, exactly these auxiliary signs essentially define the meaning for the whole sentence or the poem. Here, the sheets of newspaper are largely left blank, the signs as mere unreadable connotations. The text, in other words, becomes an abstract drawing, bearing within it the possibility of a whole new reading.

Info: “Latifa Echakhch-Le jardin mécanique”, Curator: Célia Bernasconi, Nouveau Musée National de Monaco-Villa Sauber, 17, avenue Princesse Grace, Monaco, Duration: 20/4-28/10/18, Days & Hours: Daily 10:00-18:00, www.nmnm.mc and “Latifa Echakhch-Falling, lovely and beautiful”, KIOSK, Louis Pasteurlaan 2, Gent, Duration: 22/4-15/6/18. Days & Hours: Mon-Fri 14:00-18:00, Sat-Sun 11:00-18:00, www.kioskgallery.be