Words Jez Smadja Pictured Moroccan artist Younes Baba-Ali
One of the artists participating in this year’s Marrakech Biennale, Younes Baba-Ali is a multi-disciplinary artist and self-taught musician who creates works with macabre titles like Ending Your Life Under The Sun and Televisual Lobotomy.
Since graduating from L'Ecole Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, Strasbourg, in 2008, Baba-Ali’s installations have travelled to exhibitions the world over.
You participated in a previous edition of the Marrakech Biennale, how did you find it?
I took part in the 2009 Biennale at the invitation of Abdellah Karroum for a project called Taverna Especial. For that, I presented ‘Sound Neon’, an in situ sound installation at the Ksour Agafay venue. It was very rich experience, and included exciting international artists like Francis Alys, James Webb and Isaac Julien as well as a fairly large selection of Moroccan artists including Younès Rahmoun, Faouzi Laatiris and younger practitioners like Mustapha Akrim.
The Biennale is a great thing for Morocco where the contemporary art scene is evolving rapidly. If I could make one criticism, it’d be that the audience wasn’t too diverse, and people tended to stay in their own groups.
What are you preparing for this year’s festival?
I’m making a sculpture/installation called Ending Your Life Under The Sun, which consists of fluorescent tanning lights built into a coffin made of wood. It's a reflection on the migration of Westerners towards the south – Africa and South America especially – a migration by people looking for a better standard of living and a warmer climate.
The mirror image of this phenomenon, of course, is the flow of economic migrants from south to north, something that’s far more publicised in the media and attracts far more controversy. The coffin-solarium is a metaphor for the cultural baggage implicit in these migration patterns.
Sound and music seem to be vital elements in your work. A car-horn orchestra. The call to prayer (in Morse code). An experimental radio broadcast. A sound armchair. How did this come about?
Ever since I was young, I had a weakness for music. I am a self-taught musician. It’s something I always had in me, unconsciously. When I began art college I started to make more and more music, either alone or with others. It was a way of expressing myself more frankly and intuitively. But most of all I enjoyed doing it.
Thanks to my painting teacher, Frank Bragigand, I started to integrate sound into my work and later started to develop a technique more squarely focused on this medium. For me, sound is very direct. – you can’t avoid it. Yet at the same time it’s invisible and impalpable, and imposes itself in the physical space of the spectator but also on the mental plane.
Is there a thriving art scene in Morocco, and which artists do you look to the most?
Morocco is in the midst of an art boom. A new generation of artists seems to be emerging from every possible field, whether it’s music, art or contemporary dance. Though I grew up and studied in France, around five years ago I was drawn back towards Morocco in both a personal as well as professional capacity. I met a lot of young artists, mostly from the Tetouan School of Fine Art, in northern Morocco.
But it’s quite difficult for this generation to gain recognition outside Morocco, for socio-political reasons. There are visual artists like Simohammed Fettaka, Mohamed Arejdal or even Mohssin Harraki, as well as sound artists and contemporary dancers like Karim Rafi and Younes Atbane whose work I really admire and whose approach is very current and personal, but who struggle to find support domestically and abroad. From other generations, artists like Younès Rahmoun, Yto Barrada, Bouchra Khalili, Faouzi Laatiris, Mohamed El Baz and Mounir Fatmi really stand out for me.
Is there much of an infrastructure or support for art in Morocco, and what are the barriers that artists face?
There’s been some really interesting initiatives for a few years now, often undertaken by independent institutions like Galerie FJ (Casabanca), L’Appartement 22 (Rabat), Cinémathèque de Tanger (Tangiers) or the Cube (Rabat). What I’ve noticed is that art in Morocco has grown really quite quickly, but often in quite a superficial way; one which doesn't afford young artists the time to experiment or research and forces them to produce work that can be sold, often by sacrificing their own individual approach.
Unfortunately, there are very few artist residencies or other opportunities allowing the means and space to develop artistically. In Morocco there are just two art schools – in Tetouan and Casablanca – and knowledge of contemporary practices like video, installation and performance is quite thin on the ground.