The 6th Marrakech Biennale ran from February 24th to the 8th of May, 2016. Its curator was Reem Fadda.
The 6th Marrakech Biennale was a good, mid-size show featuring a number of strong works and interesting themes. Spreading the biennale throughout the city’s important tourist locations gave the show its character. However, this choice came with advantages and disadvantages. Nothing could have been better than wandering through the Medina from one of the biennale’s sites to another; many of the show’s locations were simply breathtaking. Dar Si Said and the Palais El Bahia were amazing. But putting work in tourist locations also sent the message that the biennale was for tourists; that a biennale does not have its roots in a local audience is often seen as a flaw, since it limits the potential for exchange. The other problem was that occasionally it felt like there must be better places to show contemporary art, especially with regard to some of the works shown outside at Palais El Badii. Some works seemed overwhelmed by the vastness of the space, and the fragility of others seemed at odds with the harshness of the climate.
As opposed to creating a catalogue for all of its artists, the Marrakech Biennale’s organizers chose to create a pamphlet for each. This choice risked concealing what a well-curated show the biennale was. Its pamphlets put the emphasis on each individual artist, obscuring the ideas that connected all of their work, and thus hiding the show’s overall logic and rigor. A catalogue would have also removed the initial negative impression created by the quantity of older work. Biennales are commonly criticized for not having enough work created explicitly for them; but judging the 6th Marrakech Biennale by this criterion misses the point. Its greatest strength was not that it was a showcase of new work, but that it seemed to create an aesthetic genealogy that placed the city of Marrakesh at the intersection of Africa and the Middle East.
The show’s curator, Reem Fadda, appears to have built the biennale on these two pillars, with the work of the Ecole des Beaux-Art de Casablanca functioning as a meeting point between the two. Fadda used their work and the poetically physical sculptures of Khalil El Ghrib to develop an aesthetic that united much of the show’s work. It connected artists from the Middle East and Africa and the African Diaspora, notably two African American artists. The beautiful hanging works of both Al Loving and Sam Gilliam not only shared the palette of the Ecole des Beaux-Art de Casablanca but much of its physicality. And Melvin Edward contributed to the show’s aesthetic, albeit indirectly, with his wonderful welded work inspired by African masks. The development of the biennial’s aesthetic led to a challenging and physical installation by Oscar Murillo and to curious and beautiful works by Jumana Manna.
Two important essay films that focused on African unity added to this commitment to transnational connections. The first was Marthia Diaware’s visually uneven but intellectually stunning film, Négritude: Un Dialogue Entre Senghor and Soyinka, which staged a discussion between Wole Soyinka and Léopold Sédar Senghor. It was created by combining historical footage of Senghor talking about the negritude movement with footage of Soyinka commenting on Senghor’s ideas. The second film was the Otolith Group’s wonderful film, In the Year of the Quiet Sun, about the year that almost led to African unity; the film’s story was told through postage stamps. These nostalgic returns to the moment of African independence and African unity seemed both to run the risk of being co-opted by neoliberal globalism but also to present the sort of transnational solidarity that may be key to resisting it.
The extremely important Senegalese filmmaker Djibul Diop Mambeth had three films in the biennale. Unfortunately, because all three films were playing at the same time in the same room, they functioned more as a nod to the historical importance of the works, as opposed to an opportunity for viewers to watch them.
The show also contained a number of wonderful conceptual works. Naeem Mohaiemen had a project which was impossible to find—it was hidden in a lower level of the Khalid Art Gallery— but was one of my favorite works. It was called Volume Eleven (flaw in the algorithm for cosmopolitanism). It told the story of Mohaiemen’s great uncle Syed Mujtabe Ali, an important Bengali journalist and scholar, who admired “Adolf Hitler as a military strategist.” He also believed that if the Germans defeated the English it would lead to the liberation of India. And Rayyane Tabet had a wonderful work about his great-grandfather’s relationship to a German spy in World War II.
Superflex had a beautiful film called Kwassa Kwassa that tells the story of Mayotte, an island off the coast of Africa, which in 2014 voted to return to the status of a French colony. Mayotte’s becoming linked to Europe led to mass immigration from the African continent and the surrounding islands. These immigrants arrived on fiberglass boats called kwass. In the film the kwass poetically became Zeus, who in Greek mythology abducted Europa, whom the film presents as an African woman. In the same space Kader Attia had a version of his installation Reasons Oxymoron, an amazing work, but one shown at too many recent biennales.
The Marrakech Biennale was an extremely well-curated show which not only seemed to produce an aesthetic genealogy locating Marrakesh at the intersection of Africa and the Middle East, but that also contained a number of wonderful conceptual works and films, with two of the films looking at African unity and the Negritude movement. The biennale was well worth the visit; and, needless to say, so was Marrakech.
©Vincent Pruden