$28,000

Artwork Description

| About the work Contemporary art, deeply marked by the exploration of exteriority, offers the artist a panoply of possibilities, so that he can reinvent the world and its spaces, according to the research and instantaneous variations that run through his boiling imagination. However, there are few artists who tend more towards a fertile interiority, marked by snatches of memory, fragments of stories and primordial emotions. Without being totally introspective, such a vision deconstructs ruptures, reinstates the bridges between body and memory, sense and senses, and establishes itself as a fragmentary vision whose openings, discoveries and compositions sometimes engender a reinvention of the self... You have to plunge into the nakedness of memory to find there the volatile and immeasurable traces of a life propelled into the future... Arejdal does this constantly, with virulence and anxiety, in search of what is tirelessly woven in his body. These traces move sometimes as metaphors, travelling signs, sometimes as vivid metonymies that reshape the places, beings and evanescent states of a life: his own, that of his community and that of the places of his childhood. It's easy to see why, in the works created by Mohamed Arejdal, the process of losing the nomadic tents, which is accelerating daily, is transformed into woollen beads strung and fixed with galvanised wire to a wooden hoop that looks like a drifting boat. These works encapsulate the nomadic life and experience. Territories and memories, traces and writings, displacements and movements, encounters and separations, friendships and loves, marriages and divorces, deaths and births... all this is symbolically recorded in the wires whose intertwining forms constellating balls of wool. According to the artist, the different sizes of these balls express the family and the different ages of the individuals who make it up, as well as the ties that bind them together and with other populations. The ‘Lehammar’ - the support for the tent - is made and decorated with care by the men, and with age, the stresses of the rope and the weight of time give it its arched shape. The women were responsible for working the wool. | About the artist Born in 1984 in Guelmim in southern Morocco, Mohamed Arejdal developed a passion for drawing and sculpture from an early age, exhibiting his work as an amateur from the age of 17. After dropping out of school, he attempted a clandestine crossing to the Canary Islands, but failed. In 2009, he graduated from the Institut National des Beaux-arts in Tétouan. In 2012, he declared his artistic birth during a mesmerising performance in Jamaa El Fna square in Marrakech. He then laid the foundations for a multidisciplinary practice in which he explored the links between social groups that he questioned during his encounters and travels. His performances occupy a very important place in his work, in which he challenges the public about his condition as an artist and the meaning of powerful symbols. Since 2008, Mohamed Arejdal has taken part in a number of major projects, including BIENALSUR 2019 in Argentina, ‘Poésies Africaines’ and ‘Traversées’ at the Comptoir des Mines Galerie alongside the 1-54 Marrakech fair, ‘En quête d'archive’ at ‘Silent Green’ in Berlin, ‘Le Maroc contemporain’ at the IMA - Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, ‘Cette fois, le sujet est personnel’ at Makan in Jordan and the Jerusalem Biennial. Collections | Élisabeth Bauchet-Bouhlal · Dalloul Art Foundation · Alliances Foundation · Maliha Tabari