ART SCENE MOROCCO PART 1

Morocco Local Arts Scenes (part 1)

Between Past and Future

Friday, July 8th at 2 pm in zoom

An overview of the artistic and cultural resources that characterize Morocco, and is an occasion to discover the curricula and methods that some artists and cultural managers work on.

This initiative is part of the cultural and academic program Tasawwar.

Tasawar is a postgraduate, one-year program designed for artists, curators, art mediators, cultural producers, researchers, and writers in art who wish to incorporate new organizational approaches and methods into their professional and artistic practice.

Guest speakers :

Dounia Benqassem, Art critic and Art historian – Rabat.

Art critic and Art historian, author and publisher at Editions AfricArts, Casablanca, Morocco.

Born on 24 October 1945 in Taza, Morocco. Studied at Mohamed V University in Rabat Morocco and Paris I Sorbonne in France.

1984 to 2005: Professor of Linguistics at Hassan II University, College of Arts and Humanities of Aîn Chok, English Department, Casablanca, Morocco.

Publications on Arts at Editions AfricArts, Casablanca, Morocco:

2010: Dictionnaire des Artistes Contemporains du Maroc – 260 artists and 50 Art spaces: galleries, museums, and art schools.

2015 : Collection Identité Culture Nationale et Décolonisation de l’art africain : L’Ecole de Casablanca ; L’Ecole de Tétouan ; L’Ecole de Dakar.

2015 : Comics with an Attitude : The outcomes of workshops conducted by the collective ART APPRECIATION at Hassan II University, in collaboration with Transparency International.

2004-2006: Collection of interviews with 60 Moroccan artists, documenting 50 Years of Visuel Arts in Morocco, 1956-2006. The interviews along with visual archives, artworks and other documents will be published in two volumes in 2020/2023.

Mohamed Hamdouni, Academic researcher – Fez.

Mohamed is a researcher in anthropology and sociology of art and communication, he is also the founder and art director of Takafes, an art foundation in Fez Morocco.  He has conducted a study on the perception of Moroccans of Contemporary Art. His focus  goes on the history of the emergence of art in Morocco after independence in contrast to the role of creation in Moroccan craft culture. He is a speaker on the anthropology of objects in the school of architecture at the EuroMed University of Fez. He has published numerous articles concerning the notion of art and modernity in Morocco. He has participated in numerous colloquia on modernity and Moroccan culture, postmodern thought and decolonial epistemology.

Youssef El Idrissi, Visual Artist – Casablanca.

Youssef is a self-taught artist, researcher and cultural worker, based in Casablanca, Morocco. His artistic practice is a combination of softwares, node-based coding, poetry, field recording, filming, analog machines and other materials used for video art installations.

He began his artistic journey in 2015 through his visual project Glitcharmony that consists of exploring technological errors mixed with human impulse towards harmony.

Morocco Local Art Scenes curators :

• Omar Chennafi
• Achraf Remok