Es Baluard Museu d’Art Contemporani de Palma presents the exhibition “Mounir Fatmi. While the Storm Arrives”, that will open to the public on March 16 at 7:00 p.m. In addition, the Museum organizes an exclusive visit for Members of Es Baluard to the exhibition with the artist and curator on the same day 16.
“Mounir Fatmi. While the Storm Arrives” is a project for our tumultuous times in which the artist assesses the sheer weight of accounts and commentaries we increasingly have to bear—physically and intellectually violent narratives that have marked our past and are now shaping our future. Based on a dialogue with the curator, Fernando Gómez de la Cuesta, the project points to the need to review some of the codes that shape our history.
Around the large central installation Inside the Fire Circle 02, the artist forges a metaphor of the construction of history, the factors conditioning it, the interests governing it and the manipulations radiated by the dominant power, while still leaving a chink of hope that this hamstrung, unhinged and indolent society might somehow rouse itself to search for change that has never been needed so urgently.
Three new pieces have been specially created for this project: The Point of No Return, in which fatmi explores the idea of a world invaded by information where everything has been turned into often complex and incomprehensible data, graphs and symbols that synthesise and transmute our relationship with reality; the eponymous Before the Storm, a large painted installation with clear references to the decorative tradition in Islamic art in which a disturbing set of polychrome arabesques reflects the tense times we are currently living through; and Poems: The Missing Show, which takes the form of a poetic video that engages us in questions related to the fear of others, exclusion, xenophobia and the fateful danger of stereotypes, generalisations and prejudices that emanate from the slogans created by the hegemony of empire. These three new works are accompanied by two existing pieces: The Angel’s Black Leg (2011) and History Is Not Mine (2013).
Mounir Fatmi was born in Tangier, Morocco, in 1970. He moved with his family to Casablanca when he was four, and at seventeen he went to study at the Accademy of Fine Arts in Rome. He returned to Casablanca to attend the School of Fine Arts, before winning a place at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam. He works with obsolete materials such as antenna cables and old typewriters in a process of experimental archaeology that explores the role of the artist in a society in crisis, while questioning the limits of memory, language and communication. His research reflects on the history of technologies and their influence on ideologies, popular culture, knowledge transfer and the suggestive power of images.
The exhibition is located in Exhibition Hall D from March 17 to June 19 and has the collaboration of El Corte Inglés.