Latifa Echakhch

Born in 1974 in El Khnansa (Morocco), she lives and works in Martigny (Switzerland). 
 

For the past fifteen years Latifa Echakhch has developed a practice of installation, pictures and sculptures that allegorically echoes a perception of the world tinted with melancholy. Her art works show themselves in an “afterwards” temporality in which the exhibited elements demonstrate the vigorous gestures that the artist makes upon them. Choosing materials and objects that are invested by a strongly intimate or historical charge (personal belongings, revolutionary equipment, household objects, theatre accessories, etc.), she deprives them of their use by more or less violent acts of destruction, covering, erasing. Thinned-out carpets show their skeletal outlines (Frames, 2000-2010), sheets of carbon paper drip with ink after having been drenched in alcohol (À chaque stencil une révolution, 2007), masts deprived of their flags intermingle in a wild and mute hedge (Fantasia, 2011).

The work she proposed to the contemporary art centre Chapelle Saint-Jacques was specially thought and produced in relation to the particular architec- ture and spiritual past of the place.
 

Latifa Echakhch's work has been presented in important contemporary art institutions in Europe (MAC Lyon, Centre Pompidou, Tate Modern, Kunsthaus Zurich, etc.) and internationally (PS1, Hammer Museum, Swiss Institute NY) as well as in many bien- nales (Venice in 2011 and Istanbul in 2017). She was awarded the Prix Marcel Duchamp in 2013 and the Zurich Art Prize in 2015. Born in 1972 in El Khnansa (Morocco), she lives and works in Paris.