Madiha Sebbani featured in 'Chronicles Of The Coming World...' Group Exhibition at Alyss'Art Gallery

Published 18 December 2020 in News

Alyss'art Gallery

Group Exhibition 'Chronicles Of The Coming World...'

Alyss'Art Gallery

Participating Artists: Abdeljalil Saouli, Hakim Benchekroun, Nafie Ben Krich, Ramia Beladel, Sabrine Lahrach, Hicham Matini, Saad Nazih, Mehdi Ouahmane, Amina Rezki, Madiha Sebbani, Malek Sordo & Monia Touiss.

Chronicles Of The Coming World ...

And then the catastrophe ...

I remember: this century was beginning and yet it already seemed to be coming to an end ...

It carried within it the decadence of the ends of the world, and then: the catastrophe ...

These 20s that we are living are not reminiscent of other 1920s, it was the last century and it was variously called the interwar period or the Roaring Twenties…

Then the world got carried away even more and was it still possible ? And then the world was in a state of permanent war, how else?

So what can our 20s correspond to, with this redundancy of the number 20, like this: 2020… What can this reiteration be the allegory of?

In this world that is coming from which Cassandra has protected us so much, what remains to be saved?

And here is a handful of artists who persist and sign to give us some intuitive keys and will they be condemned like all prophets to shout at each other through our deserts or our forests ... We know that no one is an oracle in his country, it even bears an idiomatic name: the Cassandre syndrome theorized by Gaston Bachelard, the very one who advocates disobedience and rejection, this saving “no” which allows healthy mutations. Towards a better perhaps but above all by leaving the paths of too late already tested, and which no longer carry any hope, any horizon ...

This is not yet another remake of the Controversy of the Ancients and the Moderns, but of an instinct that pushes towards renewal, abandoning the worst, obsolescence and their co-morbidities ...

And they are there today present through their works but more a form of utopian commitment to remind us of what this coming world could be ...

Abdeljalil Saouli returns to this nature which has never left it, in his beautiful painting which reinterprets the New York Color Field Painting dear to a Rothko, all the elements are drawn from around his hermitage there in his preserved mountain: flower, leaves, various oxidations by telluric elements which remind us that this coming world does not have a Planet B and that we will have to learn to repair ...

Hakim Benchekroun restores poetry to us, in his photographs of an already finished world, the human presence which was is sublimated by an aesthetic of ruin, the artist even prefers the term pornography ... Here the man was, and here it was too late even before starting, and its romanticism allows us to feel it.

And then there are the Men, some advance masked and should we learn to beware of them? It is this question among others that Madiha Sebbani asks, during performative expeditions in the Medina of Fez which bring into play the common and otherness. And what state of nature can we hope to inherit if this new world comes to pass?

Are we really doomed to freedom? Are there any burdens that we can shed? The very ones that Saad Nazih figures in his futuro-surrealist universe? Situations that condense our lives into "absurdity": bodies, in their simple devices, are weightless, stripped of and devoid of the civilizational varnish which all around tries to become embedded, to hold back through the trivial or even the vulgar (in the etymological sense, of course) this desire to rise to social and gregarious constructions of an indefinite mass.

The very one who sets up Golden Calves in prosaic deities. Milk cows as Mehdi Ouahmane expresses it, where the sacred is no more than a speculative object, a market place ... And then, when this world will collapse like all the previous ones since Babylon and its Tower of Babel which hoped to compete by humans with other demiurgies, will we be able to better protect ourselves from the redundancy of these megalomanias and their dangers?

How will we know how to recognize the seeds of the tares, the powders in the eyes and those of perlimpine? Behind our smoke screens, which have become even more addictive if it were possible since the crises of the pandemic, what autonomy can we still have? The Société des Spectacles has become well, as predicted by another Cassandra dear to Hicham Matini, who makes works of them where information that has become disinformation has been reincarnated in the opium of permanently enslaved peoples.

Question of a balance that has been lost and will we be able to find it again in this coming world? At Malek Sordo, it's all about posture. Or rather of impostures, to bow down as some adepts of courtiers do at the risk of bending under the weight of derisory artefacts without density but which we have become accustomed to letting us determine.

And we can always like Nafie Ben Krich, ask who the chicken or the egg? for what that changes? It is always a question of undifferentiated "stereotypical" objects, domesticated to become interchangeable, suitable for easy consumption, which does not question, no longer surprise ...

There are still some beauties of this world, to save in order to be able to save us… Humanities to keep, moments, stories, made up of transmission, sharing and solidarity… And that may be the meaning of the drawings that Ramia reveals to us Beladel, resulting from a workshop with communities of women in a preserved oasis, and for how long?

This beauty towards all, is also found in Sabrina Lahrach who lists ancestral gestures of all these penelopes who withdraw from the noisy world full of clashes of men to expect the best and perhaps this world to come?

Amina Rezki and Monia Touiss patiently paint the dazzling beauties to be preserved ... A few landscapes, but also portraits, every morning in the world before dusk ... All the possibilities that we still have to live and create ...

Woman is the future of man sang Jean Ferrat from the poem of Aragon. And it is obvious that this patriarchal world breathless by so many wars, mistakes and contempt, will have to succeed a world which necessarily to be matriarchal will have to reinvent itself ...

So let's hope so: with the artist as the future, yes as the horizon to come ...

2020 and its crazy redundancy ends with this promise ... Let us learn to welcome it and let ourselves be tamed ... May our artists no longer be Cassandras, but "The guardians of Beauty" ... Because as the Poet wrote: " Apart from that, there is nothing… ”

Date: 18 December 2020 - 18 January 2021

Venue: 3 Rue Benghazi, Appt 1, Place Pietri, 10000 Rabat, Morocco

For more information about the exhibition please navigate to the Alyss'Art Galerie website here