Sharjah Art Foundation
24.02 - 16.06.2024
During a tumultuous year, monopolized by events in the Global North, students and lecturers of the Casablanca Art School inaugurated a joint exhibition in the city’s Arab League Park Pavilion, opening what has become known amongst scholars today as an example of decolonized education and an exercise in creative collectivity. According to a feature published in the revolutionary Moroccan journal Souffles, after numerous meetings and preliminary discussions, staff and students decided that the proverbial end-of-year exhibition of 1968 should not be the run-of-the-mill display of academic performance, achievement, and command, but rather an experimental Gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art. Together, staff and students integrated the pavilion’s architecture into a reordered exhibitionary complex, with a mix of dialoguing paintings and objects, conceived in organic synthesis, breaking down the colonial barriers and hierarchies that had been erected between the disciplines and the school’s cohort, reminding South African viewers, or perhaps this viewer, of a more recent attempt at dismantling his Master’s house on Hiddingh Campus, and how temporally bounded these transformative moments of rupture (and rapture) can be. Collectively, the historic Moroccan cohort of the 60s sought to recover the social impetus of traditional arts, opening the doors of the school to society and a profound consideration of the role of the artist in an active and defiant post-colonial dispensation.
In its second iteration at the quizzically coiffured beach-side neighbourhood of Al Hamriyah, The Casablanca Art School: Platforms and Patterns for a Postcolonial Avant-Garde (1962-1987), sheds light on this otherwise historically obscured moment — not only the 1968 exhibition, but a utopian era and wave initiated by the school — foregrounding the artists and students who took part in it, and their recuperative effort to document, record and integrate what colonial authorities had disparaged and removed as rightful sources of inspiration from their students and the academy: African, Amazigh, Islamic and Mediterranean heritage.
Rare historical publications highlighted in The Casablanca Art School: Platforms and Patterns for a Postcolonial Avant-Garde (1962-1987), Al Hamriyah Studios, Sharjah. Magreb Art, featured here, was published between 1965 and 1969, with the aim of documenting the heritage created by villagers in the Souss and High Atlas Mountains. Image: Nancy Dantas
Arranged by themed sequenced platforms, this elegant exhibition, with its parsed supporting text, documents an era of intersecting and concentric African and Arab art histories. On electing curatorial strategies of textual reassertion, and reshowing and rehanging, albeit with temporal and spatial inflection, curators Morad Montazami and Madeleine de Colnet, aided by the exquisite special designer Mona El Chaar, operate critical ethic and epistemic interventions into art history at large, drawing attention to the discipline’s oversights, whilst notably refraining from explicitly addressing the demise of the moment1For precision, the curatorial team in Sharjah comprised Morad Montazami and Madeleine de Colnet on behalf of Zamân Books & Curating, with Hoor Al Qasimi, Director of Sharjah Art Foundation; May Alqaydi, Assistant Curator at Sharjah Art Foundation; and associate researchers Fatima-Zahra Lakrissa and Maud Houssais on the curation. The entire team is not identified in the main text for reasons of economy. .
To this effect, in one of the first rooms, Montazami and de Colnet restage one of the many murals present in the 1968 students’ exhibition. The mural-cum-installation is made up of a revised and expanded interpretation of the original staging of the surviving earthenware works by Abderrahman Rahoule against an Op Art mural. In its current form, placed on individualized white pedestals that elevate and ascend by way of a staircase-like formation into the image on the back, the display of organic ceramics and hard-edge mural read as one, amplifying the trompe-l’œil with the eye being drawn to a Fibonacci-like spiral, an explicit reference to the central place, force and unseen presence of geometry in Islamic art and architecture. Rahoule would have been a student at the time, having later served as a professor from 1972 and director from 2004. Like many of his peers, he trained at the school and abroad, namely ceramics in the Netherlands and Czechoslovakia in 1967, and explored multiple sculptural fields and myriad materials, with a vocabulary inspired by vernacular forms that question the limits imposed on decorative arts.
Section on the importance of graphic design. Mohammed Chabâa, one of the school’s tutors, considered the poster as a form of painting accessible to all. The Casablanca Art School: Platforms and Patterns for a Postcolonial Avant-Garde (1962-1987), Al Hamriyah Studios, Sharjah. Image: Nancy Dantas
Included too are a plethora of artworks, visual documents and publications, such as the previously mentioned Souffles and Intégral, which emerged contemporaneous to these landmark interventions, important to Moroccan, and African historiography, articulating and disseminating artists’ frustration with the passive state of affairs after independence. Driven by the desire to secularize art and break with the idea of abstraction and politics as antithetical, Mohammed Ataalah, Farid Belkahia, Mohamed Chabâa, Mustapha Hafid and Mohamed Melehi, in another instance of defiance, chose to take to the streets, exhibiting their work under the baking sun amongst the bustling crowd of the marketplace Jemaa el Fna, close to the gates of the Medina, not only “putting streets into painting but painting into the streets,2Michel Gauthier, Melehi (Paris: Skira, 2019): 88.” officially auguring what has become known as the Casablanca School and its call to question the separation between art and life. Souffles not only documented these aesthetic interventions as solutions to the democratization and decolonization of the Moroccan arts sphere but also served as a platform for cosmopolitan, pan-African and pan-Arab writing and thinking. Sold at 3 Moroccan Dirhams, its expanded bi-lingual version, titled Souffles-Anfas reached subscribers in the Middle East, Europe and Latin America with a 19th number titled Une seule et même comba (The Common Struggle, author’s translation), with a multiplied, Benday-dot inspired Lumumba, spread to the left and right of a soldier on its cover. By 1972 the journal had been banned and Chabâa, its sole designer, imprisoned for Marxist activity. Founder Abdellatif Laâbi, the journal founder, was also sentenced to life.
Présence Plastique, Jemaa el-Fna square, Marrakech (May 1969). © M. Melehi archives/estate.
The outcome of a residency, years of research and archival production, with several videos, historic documentaries, and contemporary interviews, this exhibition not only plots events within Morocco but maps friendships, configurations and transnational alliances which impact our understanding of modernism as multiple and global.
