L’Atelier 21 presents the third solo exhibition by visual artist M’barek Bouhchichi titled What I Am, What We Are.
This exhibition consists of a series of portraits painted directly onto sheets of rubber. With this practice, M’barek Bouhchichi continues his exploration where art, memory and politics intertwine to create a new visual order. Far from a purely illustrative approach, his painting becomes a space of symbolic resistance, where bodies reappear as bearers of stories long pushed to the margins.
Black Moroccans are the core subject of Bouhchichi’s work. By embracing the quintessential retinal medium—painting—the artist passionately continues his mission to render visible Black men and women, along with their cultural practices.
This exhibition stems from the artist’s personal encounters with members of the Ismgans/Ismkhan community in the Merzouga region in northeastern Morocco, a people who left their mark on the artist. With that said, the artist uses remembered or imagined faces, arising from an inner space that only painting allows access to. According to art historian Jamila Moroder, “M’barek Bouhchichi’s painting is neither simple figuration nor pure representation: it unfolds as a sensitive archaeology, a practice that intertwines the depths of the earth — bitumen, mica — with light and color, to explore what an ethics of the gaze might be.”
M’barek Bouhchichi’s works are part of major collections, including those of the Musée National d’Art Moderne of the Centre Georges Pompidou (France), the American Friends of the Arts in North Africa Foundation (USA), the Fondation H (Madagascar) and the Mohammed VI Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (Morocco). He lives and works in Tahannaout, Morocco. The exhibition will run until the 5th of 2025 at L’Atelier 21 in Casablanca, Morocco.
