180° Behind Me

By Mounir Fatmi

"The first major solo presentation by mounir fatmi in Scandinavia comes at a very particular time. In the spring of 2018, Freemuse – an independent organization working with defending the rights and freedom of artistic expression - published its first global report assessing the global state of artistic freedom. It is an important and chilling document about censorship and violations of artistic expression experienced across the globe, including the traditionally democratic western countries. Having himself experienced the consequences of a culture of silencing, mounir fatmi is an artist dedicated to exposing and deconstructing oppressive ideological and religious dogmas in works that shed light some of our most pressing political questions today.
Seeking to illuminate the role of artists in a time of crisis, the exhibition at Göteborgs Konsthall particularly addresses the urgency of free speech and seeks to open up the political potential of language as resistance. Engaging in notions of language, and the written word – its beauty, violence and fragility – fatmi’s works expose the layers of interpretation and reinterpretation that comprise our history, but also speaks directly to a culture of censorship and silencing."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mounir Fatmi
• Release date: Oct 29, 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

A world where the Other is also oneself

Sabrina Amrani

I cannot reflect upon mounir fatmi’s artistic work without drawing a parallel with the questions and theories of the numerous contemporary sociologists and philosophers, such as Derrida and Bourdieu, that the artist himself refers to. But before I thought about the significance of fatmi’s works for and in the world of art, I first appreciated them as a simple viewer. I remember my first encounter with his work: blinded by various texts embossed in an opaque coating on fluorescent tubes placed next to each other (a variation on the installation In the Absence of Evidence to the Contrary). My gaze was both enthralled by the beauty of the artistic gesture and questioned by the pertinence and audacity of the story it told. In our days of post truth, are we still capable of seeing and understanding the world we live in?

Going through the works of this retrospective at the Kunsthalle in Göteborg, I realize that the mediums used by the artist are materials for the transmission of information, knowledge and sometimes propaganda (VHS cassette, video, typewriter…) but that they are also symbolically aggressive: cables, wire connectors, construction tools, pieces of metal…

mounir fatmi’s work is a metaphor adapted to our modern times, it conveys a certain tension that can also be found between the alluring and playful esthetic of his works and the messages they bear. With this exhibit, fatmi celebrates a thirty-year career and shares with the viewer a corpus of visionary reflections.

mounir fatmi often resorts to nostalgic machines and objects of everyday life. But from this mechanical representation of the world emanates a sensitivity that resonates in me. An echo of a life in between two worlds perhaps, an autobiographical story or simply a worldview made up of multiple truths/realities. It’s from this ability to navigate between one world and the other that comes the artists capacity to question things; he ‘suffers’ from the necessity to understand the Other. A permeable world where the other is also oneself, where cultures interconnect, where identity is fluid.

This ‘Other’, he who is different because of his language, his culture, his roots and his thoughts, is above all he who is defined by his differences. Individual and collective identities are defined by history and geography, work or culture (traditions). Today, these concepts are turned upside down by industrial development as well as new media and technologies that have accelerated mutations and generate complex identities. mounir fatmi isn’t applying himself to redefining identity but to drawing its outlines, its limits and failures, and to me, this is truly an investigation the artist is conducting about the systems of construction of identity in its political dimension. The artist-researcher questions the foundations of our societies, creating a mise en abyme between the access to information and the transmission of knowledge and values (The Index and