$20,000

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. Fascinated from an early age by the various dimensions of ‘nomadism’, Mohamed Arejdal sounded the alarm against the programmed extinction of the ‘nomadic caravans’ and their socio-cultural contributions to the so-called ‘southern’ populations. For him, ‘the South’ is not a specific territory but an aggregate of customs and cultural practices linked to several territories in the great Sahara. The settlement of populations around new modern urban centres, together with the closure or strict control of the borders of several Sahelian countries, is having a profound impact on the lifestyles of populations who are finding it difficult to preserve their cultural heritage. Mohamed Arejdal uses the imprint of the ‘desert traveller’ or his fragments to draw attention to this brutal situation, which is disorientating the younger generations ‘from the South’ who have been seduced by a modernity at odds with their traditions. | 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