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Artwork Description

| About the work There is a subtle Ariadne's thread running through Mustapha Akrim's artistic career. The artist's ongoing and constantly evolving reflection on the work and contemporary history of Morocco as a material and as a value is the hallmark of his approach. It's a practice on and through materials; an artistic work in progress that imposes itself on us through the coherence and subtlety of the path it takes. Mustapha Akrim's rich investigation of the world of working-class and industrial labour, his questioning of clothing, everyday objects and tools, has always kept the process as an approach. He does not draw on mimicry, but borrows the modalities of his subjects to integrate them into his artistic process. In this way, the artist takes on the gestures of the worker, captures the images of the reporter, and tracks down traces like an archaeologist digging to reconstruct history through its residues. The artist combines techniques and brings them closer to the materiality of history and the values of society, such as work, equality and freedom. The incessant to-and-fro between materiality and immateriality, between raw material and aesthetic shaping, is expressed in the assemblies of tools cut and grouped together in Tondo. The geometric shapes seen from afar create trompe l'œil poetic landscapes made up of a multitude of tool fragments that Mustapha Akrim patiently lays down and composes before pressing and fixing them. The result is landscapes with ambiguous compositions, like hoops that play with history. | About the artist Mustapha Akrim graduated from the Institut National des Beaux-Arts in Tétouan in 2008. His various works are the result of social research, particularly on the world of the building site and the worker, with a reflection closely linked to the principles of citizenship. Aware of Moroccan social realities, he is working to open up “several construction sites”, including “the site of memory”, using his favourite material: concrete. His installations question, among other things, the nature of work and the difference between building and creating works of art, in the light of constant changes in society. He is part of a generation of artists who are developing a new language to redefine the basis of the visual arts exhibition in Morocco, seeking a new freedom of expression by breaking with the aesthetic developed in the post-colonial period. He has exhibited in Palais de Tokyo, Paris, Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid, Bank Al Maghrib Museum, Rabat and MRAC Occitanie, Sérignan. Collections | Dalloul Art Foundation · Sharjah Foundation · Élisabeth Bauchet-Bouhlal · International private collections