This Is My Body

By Mounir Fatmi

"Come and discover This is my Body, an extraordinary project gathering 50 videos by multidisciplinary artist mounir fatmi. The fruit of a collaboration between the Analix Forever and Art Bärtschi & Cie galleries, this exhibit brings together for the first time nearly all of the artist’s videos. 20 years of creation – from 1997 to 2007.
When hearing the name mounir fatmi, one can’t help but think of his sculptures and installations addressing the issues of free expression and censorship. His works, both material and immaterial, all have in common striking concepts and powerful images. Video is his preferred medium. Contrary to a painting where the image remains motionless and unchanging, a screen always offers the possibility of being turned off, thus making the work disappear, of giving it life or not at any chosen moment. With video, he can claim that reality doesn’t exist, that it is just an illusion, an aesthetic trap that closes on the viewer but disappears when the film is over. One concept is particularly appealing to the artist and can be found in his choice of materials for his palpable works: antenna cables, VHS cassettes and various other objects becoming rare in today’s digital landscape."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mounir Fatmi
• Release date: Nov 8, 2021

Mounir Fatmi

mounir fatmi is a visual artist born in Tangier, Morocco in 1970. He constructs visual spaces and linguistic games. His work deals with the desecration of religious objects, deconstruction, and the end of dogmas and ideologies. He questions the world and plays with its codes and precepts under the prism of architecture, language and the machine. He is particularly interested in the idea of the role of the artist in a society in crisis. mounir fatmi's work offers a look at the world from a different glance, refusing to be blinded by convention. He brings to light our doubts, fears and desires.He has published several books and art catalogs including: The Kissing Precise, with Régis Durand, La Muette edition, Brussels, 2013, Suspect Language, with Lillian Davies, Skira edition, Italy, 2012, This is not blasphemy, in collaboration with Ariel Kyrou, Inculte-Dernier Marge & Actes Sud edition, 2015, History is not Mine, SF Publishing, Paris, 2015, and Survival Signs, SF Publishing, Paris, 2017. He has also participated in the collective book, Letter to a young Moroccan, edition Seuil, Paris, 2009.He has participated in several solo and collective exhibitions in museums and galleries around the world including: Mamco, Geneva, The Picasso Museum, Vallauris, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, The Brooklyn Museum, New York, N.B.K., Berlin, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, MAXXI, Rome, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Museum on the Seam, Jerusalem, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Moscow, Mathaf Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, the Hayward Gallery, London, the Art Gallery of Western Australia, the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, and the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven.His installations have been selected in biennials such as the 52nd and the 57th Venice Biennial, the 8th biennial of Sharjah, the 5th Dakar Biennial, the 2nd Seville Biennial, the 5th Gwangju Biennial and the 10th Lyon Biennial, the 5th Auckland Triennial, Fotofest 2014, Houston, the 10th and 11th Bamako Encounters, as well as the 7th Biennale of Architecture in Shenzhen.mounir fatmi was awarded several prizes such as the Cairo Biennial Prize in 2010, the Uriöt prize, Amsterdam, the Grand Prize Leopold Sedar Senghor of the 7th Dakar Biennial in 2006 as well and he was shortlisted for the Jameel Prize of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London in 2013.

Book preview

Foreword

This is my Body

This Fall, come and discover This is my Body, an extraordinary project gathering 50 videos by multidisciplinary artist mounir fatmi. The fruit of a collaboration between the Analix Forever and Art Bärtschi & Cie galleries, this exhibit brings together for the first time nearly all of the artist’s videos. 20 years of creation – from 1997 to 2007 – can be viewed at the Loft for one month.

When hearing the name mounir fatmi, one can’t help but think of his sculptures and installations addressing the issues of free expression and censorship. His works, both material and immaterial, all have in common striking concepts and powerful images. Video is his preferred medium. Contrary to a painting where the image remains motionless and unchanging, a screen always offers the possibility of being turned off, thus making the work disappear, of giving it life or not at any chosen moment. With video, he can claim that reality doesn’t exist, that it is just an illusion, an aesthetic trap that closes on the viewer but disappears when the film is over. One concept is particularly appealing to the artist and can be found in his choice of materials for his palpable works: antenna cables, VHS cassettes and various other objects becoming rare in today’s digital landscape. In Save Manhattan (2008-2009), the idea of illusion is encountered again. Manhattan appears thanks to the shadows of electronic devices that have been placed in order to recreate the silhouette of its skyline before 9/11. Loudspeakers emit sounds creating a feeling of insecurity, interspersed with radio messages predicting imminent danger. The sound of helicopters gives the illusion of flying over the city, thus reinforcing the chaotic atmosphere that prevails over it. Language and calligraphy are rife in mounir fatmi’s work. The words used invite us to a metaphorical interpretation, whereas the phrases always evoke an underlying concept. In Modern Times, a History of the Machine (2010), the artist highlights the revolution that has been going on since 2011 in the Arab world. He created a machine that is reminiscent of Charlie Chaplin’s, beautiful but also violent and dangerous. These calligraphic wheels can be found in several other instances throughout his work. Influenced by Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy and his ‘language-games’, the artist considers that inventing a language is equivalent to creating a game and a machine. Letters thus become the wheels and cogs of a destructive machine.

Advocating non-ideology, mounir fatmi likes playing with symbols. In Manipulation (2004), hands can be seen manipulating a Rubik’s Cube representing the Kaaba. The irrational profession of faith of believers that drives them to walk around the edifice is compared to the rational strategies of players trying to solve the famous brainteaser. The theme of religion and objects of worship is recurrent in fatmi’s work. Is it because of his childhood in his father’s house in Tangiers? The artist confesses having had as religious objects only calligraphies, the Koran and a portrait of king Mohammed V whom he believed was a member of his family. These objects were so sacred that he wasn’t allowed to touch them, his hands never deemed sufficiently clean. This led the artist to ask himself questions about the world and the relation between Man and faith. What are we allowed to do? Is it possible to extract verses from a sacred book and move them into another place such as a museum? Can they be presented in a different form?

mounir fatmi’s works urge the public to think and go beyond what they see. Freedom of expression is one of the central themes in his work. In Scissors (2003), the artist shows the cut out love scenes from the TV movie Une minute de soleil en moins. The notion of memory and archives is present in this video, as an echo to the materials used in the installations, but it’s above all a head-on critique of censorship. In Sleep – Al Naim (2005-2012), the artist questions again what does and does not exist. Sleep, the original video by Andy Warhol, shows the poet John Giorno sleeping. In his remake, fatmi decided to show Salman Rushdie, a major figure of freedom of speech. As he wasn’t able to contact him, the artist decided to use computer images to show him sleeping. At the beginning of the video, one doesn’t know if the writer is alive or dead. This is a way of evoking a difficult situation, of comparing it, during the time he was using the pseudonym Joseph Anton for protection, to a ghost.

Like Salman Rushdie and his satanic verses, mounir fatmi’s art was also deemed blasphemous by certain people. While presenting Technologia (2010) in Toulouse in 2012, at the Printemps de Septembre biennale whose theme was History is mine, the artist was forced to remove his installation. History is not mine (2013) is a reaction to this incident, in which a secretary is shown putting great effort into typing a text on a typewriter using two hammers. The artist incidentally considers that when a work of art is censored, it partly becomes the work of its censors: from there on, it can only be seen through the veil of censorship.

Among the 50 videos presented, some are closer to a documentary in which the artist shows what is trying to be hidden. Embargo (1997), is about the suffering of peoples, whereas Group Therapy (2002-2003) compares two protests organized in Paris and Rabat, respectively. In mounir fatmi’s videos, the flaws of our societies and the absurdity of the human condition are criticized, but also exalted.

Carine Bovey, November 2018

From where comes the wind

From where does the wind come that forces people to emigrate? Where does it come from and where does it blow them, from Arab countries to Japan, from France to New York?

Most of the images in this film were shot in 2013 in Marseille, New York and Paris, as a part of fatmi’s project The Journey of Claude Lévi-Strauss. But beyond the journey itself, fatmi wants to focus on what makes it impossible. The Camargue seems to return to the harbour without having sailed; only the Moroccan traditional music makes the viewer travel, music that seems to sing about departures… The music was recorded by Paul Bowles – the very same Bowles whose loneliness is incarnated in the video Fragments and Solitude, filmed 18 years earlier.

The impossible journey? The displacement of merchandise (certain parts of From Where Comes the Wind? are strongly evocative of Allan Sekula’s film The Forgotten Space) and of individuals, an endless movement. A displacement that fatmi can feel in his body, like a perpetual failure, he who defines himself as an immigrant worker as well as an artist. An immigrant worker who was never able, as Tarek Elhaik wrote in 2002 (Framework, vol. 43), to let go of his original culture, nor build a new one from scratch.

fatmi wants everything: all the connections, all the grafts, all the worlds, past and future, real and virtual. From Where Comes the Wind? is born from this desire and from his frustration. fatmi dreams and lets himself be overtaken, like he rarely has done before, by a romanticism that leads him to play for us, as the colour red he has cherished for so long progressively inundates the world, Fauré’s Requiem, composed shortly after the death of the composer’s parents. In Fragments and Solitude, fatmi was still filming his parents. In From Where Comes the Wind?, red, says fatmi, is the colour of the sole character, the one who is dancing. The woman, the mother, the one who has given birth. Once again, it’s a dance with death, as in the video NADA. Red is also the colour of the Casablanca harbour at night, as well as the port of Tangiers. It’s also the red of the sun, which gives everything and demands nothing, as Georges Bataille wrote.

The colour red, adds fatmi, can often be seen in my videos. At one point during the editing process, it just imposes itself, as if it turned the other images into lies. Like a darkroom in a photography lab, the colour red reveals what cannot be seen in the dark.

Echoes with others of the artist’s video works are rife. As in The Scissors, one can see trees, and in the trees, the wind. One hears the wind and wonders: where does the wind come from? As if daydreaming led mounir fatmi – and led us – to unexplored landscapes in the mind, a lush vegetation sprouting from who knows where, yet undoubtedly rooted in the artist’s imagination, even if it’s only shown in a few videos in which the artist opens the door, maybe without even realizing it, on an intimate and poetic other world, a buried desire – the forest of Fragments and Solitude.

And again, finally, the blue sky, like an opening in fatmi’s work. The colour blue, rarely shown, no more than vegetation, in fatmi’s work – although it’s against a blue backdrop that The Lost Ones can be seen. But in From Where Comes the Wind? the sky