Sensory Spaces 14 Latifa Echakhch

’Latifa Echakhch’s work brings together apparent contrasts: it is conceptual as well as romantic, political and poetic.’

Curator Nina Folkersma

Echakhch makes works, often in the form of compositions with existing objects, which have a strongly emotional, melancholic and sometimes even violent expressive power. At the same time her work is characterized by a minimalist pictorial idiom, with an acute sense of form and an economy of means. Echakhch excels in eliminating the superfluous and maintaining a balance between form and content. Visitors who see her work often witness the fallout from an action: coloured glass shards from smashed teacups (Erratum, 2009), the scratched-out remains of a mural (Cross Fade, 2017) or prayer mats where the middles have been cut out so that only the fringed edges remain, like empty frames (Frame, 2008). Visitors only see what is left, so they must call upon their powers of imagination.

The notion of absence plays a major role in Echakhch’s oeuvre. Something that is absent or intangible – a homeland, a national identity – can have a huge and lasting impact. Yet it would be too easy to reduce her work to a melancholy reflection of ostensibly lost cultural roots. Concepts like ‘identity’, ‘origin’ and ‘belonging’ do play a role in her work, but are deconstructed rather than empowered. She uses objects, motifs and materials that are supposedly ‘Arabic’ or ‘oriental’, and thus supposed to define her culturally, but then she hollows them out or smashes them to bits – like the Moroccan teacups which are just as exotic to her as to everyone else.

Another example is the work Stoning (2010), a collection of loose stones that the artist threw forcibly against the walls of a gallery. The work inexorably conjures up the image of a stoning and is a silent indictment of this method of capital punishment, with a long history in Christian iconography and still in use in some Islamic countries . At the same time, the work holds echoes from recent art history, for example the minimalist sculptures by Richard Long and the performance Stoning the Refrigerator (1996) by Jimmie Durham. Echakhch feels a strong need to undermine preconceived ideas about identity, nationality and cultural tradition. Although this is sometimes accompanied by a violent force, the political content of her work is never frontal or one-dimensional, but rather subtle and poetic.

Essay Sensory Spaces 14 - Latifa Echakhch

Each exhibition will be accompanied by a bilingual booklet with an essay by the curator: