Mounir Fatmi

Biography

Mounir Fatmi spent his childhood in the Casabarata district of Tangier, one of the poorest in the city. His mother made a living at the flea market, selling children’s clothes, and from an early age the boy lived among worn objects and waste. Later he would make art from much the same material.

He was born in 1970. He studied first in Rome, at the free school of life drawing and engraving at the Academy of Arts, then at the School of Fine Arts in Casablanca (1989), again at the School of Fine Arts in Rome (1991) and, finally, at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. The dates of his studies differ from source to source, so I give only those that recur. In 1993 the series “Fragile / Communication” won him first prize at the Third Biennial of Young Moroccan Painting; around that time he met Catherine David. He became known outside Morocco in 1995 through his video work: he was selected for the International Videokunstpreis at the ZKM (Center for Art and Media) in Karlsruhe. In 1999 he met the curator Jean-Louis Froment and took part in the exhibition “L’objet désorienté” at the Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris, where he showed the sculpture “Connections”. In 2004 Simon Njami and Jean-Hubert Martin invited him to the exhibition “Africa Remix”. It travelled to Düsseldorf, London, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, Tokyo, Stockholm and Johannesburg. A solo exhibition followed, “Fuck Architects: Chapter I”, at Lombard Projects in New York (also written Lombard-Freid Projects).

In 2006 he received the Uriöt Prize (Amsterdam) and the Léopold Sédar Senghor Grand Prix at the Dakar Biennale; in 2010, the Cairo Biennale prize.

Fatmi works in video, installation, drawing, painting and sculpture. His materials almost always come from the past: old video cassettes, antenna cables, photocopiers, typewriters, saw blades, books, flags. His themes are identity, religion, multiculturalism, consumption, the ambiguity of language and the importance of communication. Some of the works were seen as provocations: in “Brainteaser for Moderate Muslims” Rubik’s Cubes are painted black with white stripes, so that they recall the Kaaba in Mecca. He responded to the Arab Spring with the work “The Lost Spring”. From 2011, it is reported, his work began to meet with censorship.

In 2013 his work “Modern Times, a History of the Machine” was shortlisted for the Jameel Prize 3 of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and was then shown in exhibitions linked to the prize in Kazan, at the Manege in Moscow, at the Sharjah Museum of Islamic Civilization and at the National Library of Singapore.

In 2016 he began the project “The Exile Pavilion” and held its first stage at the National Archives Museum in Paris. That year he also took part in the exhibition “Fundamental” at the Fifth Mediations Biennale in Poznań and in the Setouchi Triennale in Japan. In 2017 he showed work in the Tunisian Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale (the exhibition “The Absence of Paths”), at the Shenzhen Biennale of Architecture and at the Dakar Biennale; in the same year a work of his entered the collection of the Louvre Abu Dhabi. Among his later solo exhibitions are “Fragmented Memory” at the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg (2018) and “Heavier than Words” at Conrads gallery in Berlin (2021).

He lives and works between Paris and Tangier.