mounir fatmi

Born 1970 in Tangier (Morocco), he lives and works in Paris.  

Mounir Fatmi is one of the most important artists in North Africa, and one of the most intensely engaged in the questioning of cultural hybridisation, which is defined as an absolute value of our time. Fatmi works in multiple media (installation, video, writing, drawing, wall painting, etc.), deconstructing dogma and ideologies, and also desacralising, as part of a poetic and political approach. fatmi – he refused to use capital letters for his name, thus making his identity comparable to that of a devitalised object – may thus take an interest in the Black Panthers or in those humans who exit history and time (assuming they ever entered it). These individual destinies inform Out of History (2006), which speaks emphatically of the twin need for both memory and distance.

Presented in the hall of Les Abattoirs, the video L’homme sans cheval, mouvement 3 “comes across as a global meditation on the precarious condition of a humanity imperilled by destinies without finality” (Marie Deparis). A man in riding gear appears at the end of a path and suddenly starts madly kicking at a book, kicking it ahead of him as he moves forward. At one point, we glimpse its title: “Histoire” (History). But what history, exactly, is this horseman trying to overturn or destroy? Is it the “end of history” that has been so extensively discussed over the last two decades since the collapse of the polar Eastern and Western blocs? Marie Deparis suggests that this action of destroying a book expresses the rejection of History as “justification.” But that does not tell us whether the fact of resisting or even refusing History can open up other paths. At the end of the video, the horseman falls into the mud – thus losing his human verticality. “Man is the sole hero of his own history,” says mounir fatmi when the curtain falls on this playlet.

For Fatmi, his personal history seems inseparable from the history of whole peoples. Witness his childhood memories, as revealed in Nom et prénom (Lettres à un jeune Marocain). One day, the artist’s mother spoke words that he has never forgotten: “He who wears other men’s clothes is naked.” fatmi comments: “That is exactly what I felt in class. I was naked in front of everyone else. That day, I decided that if I was going to be punished, then at least it would be for my own mistakes. I decided to draw and write my own story. I decided to have my own thoughts, so that I would never find myself naked again.” Just as the rider in L’homme sans cheval, naked in his solitude, refuses other men’s thought.

For Fatmi, recomposing the world is a matter of moral hygiene, a point made to spectacular effect on the long wall of the Hôtel-Dieu rising above the Garonne, by Les Temps Modernes, une Histoire de la Machine. This huge public projection combines Duchamp’s roto-reliefs and the cogs of the machines in Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times with the elliptical forms of Arab calligraphy, in a vibrantly eddying ensemble that terminates in the river.