Farid Belkahia

Biography

In 1974 Belkahia resigned as director of the school under political pressure, and later described his state of mind like this: “as if in mourning, but free”. Twelve years of work in Casablanca were by then behind him.

He was born on 15 November 1934 in Marrakesh. His father, M’Hamed Belkahia, first sold perfume and then worked in the French civil administration, because he knew French well. He collected Arab and Berber carpets, and European artists who had settled in Marrakesh came to his house: the Pole Olek Teslar, the Frenchwoman Jeannine Guillou and, from 1937, Nicolas de Staël. Farid himself began to paint at about fifteen. He attended school in El Jadida and then at the Lycée Mangin in Marrakesh; his first solo exhibition was held in 1954 at the Hotel La Mamounia. From 1954 or 1955 until 1959 he studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, under Maurice Brianchon and then Raymond Legueult. His Paris teachers belonged to the circle of “poetic reality”, which stood against Cubism and abstraction, and Belkahia felt hemmed in by it. In 1958 he set off on a long journey to the East through Cairo, Damascus and Baghdad, trying to find his own Arab roots. Then came Prague and study at the theatre institute, where he worked on stage design, until 1961 or 1962. According to some sources, he afterwards studied at the Brera Academy in Milan as well, until 1966; others do not mention this.

In 1962 he was appointed director of the School of Fine Arts in Casablanca. He invited Mohammed Melehi and Mohamed Chabâa, future members of the Casablanca Group, to teach there, and reshaped the curriculum: in place of the French academic model he introduced experiment and work across disciplines. He urged his students, among them Abdallah Hariri and Houssein Miloudi, to turn to Moroccan heritage, to carpets and woollen textiles. In 1964 he travelled in West Africa, and in 1969 to Mexico and Peru, where he noticed similarities between Inca culture and that of the Berbers of the Middle Atlas. In 1969, together with the Casablanca Group, he organised the exhibition “Présence plastique” in Jemaa el-Fnaa square in Marrakesh. He also took part in the magazine Souffles (“Breaths”), published by the poet Abdellatif Laâbi. When the magazine moved towards a Marxist-Leninist line, Belkahia drew away from Melehi and Chabâa. After the attempted coup at Skhirat in 1971 the magazine was banned, in 1972 Laâbi and other friends of Belkahia were arrested, and in 1973 some of them were sentenced to long prison terms. It was then that he left the school.

In the 1960s he moved from oil to copper: he stretched the metal over wood, hammered it and folded it, producing reliefs with Berber symbols and masks. In the mid-1970s it was the turn of leather. This too was stretched over a wooden base and coloured with henna, which he prepared himself, adding saffron, tea, spices and minerals. To my mind, the main point of this change is that the line between craft and art ceased to exist for him: he took his materials from the city workshop, not from the art-supply shop. He used Tifinagh letters, the script of the Tuareg, and so drew attention to their situation in Morocco. In 1980 he made the series “Main” (“Hand”) in various formats.

After his resignation he went for a time to Lisbon, where he rented a workshop and learned from the engraver David de Almeida, but in the same year he returned to Casablanca and worked without a regular post. In 1974 he took part in the first Arab Biennial in Baghdad. When in 1976 the biennial was to be held in Morocco in the name of Palestine, and the Ministry of Culture took over the organisation, he refused to take part and withdrew his works. In 1990 he returned to Marrakesh and set up a large studio in his home.

International recognition came in the 1990s: “Rencontres africaines” at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris (1994, where he was curator), “Meditation” at the Ben Youssef Madrasa in Marrakesh (1997), Tate Liverpool, and an exhibition for the fiftieth anniversary of the United Nations in Geneva. In 2005, at the Institut du Monde Arabe, he was given a separate black room in honour of the cartographer al-Idrisi and touched on the theme of colonial violence. In 2011, for the opening of the Mathaf museum in Doha, he made the sculpture “The Doors of Infinity”.

Belkahia died on 25 September 2014 in Marrakesh. After his death a foundation in his name was established, and his house and studio became a museum. His works are held by the British Museum, Tate Modern and the Centre Pompidou.