CROSSING WORLDS, CURATING WORLD
Art could be anything imagined as such by anyone able to perceive the world through this same “anything”: a painting, a combination of movements, a group of composed words, a selected object.
Curating often comes after art, but sometimes it emerges with it, in the same places with the same shared perceptions, memory, and trauma.
The closest field to describe curating is publishing. Art is for the curator what literature is for the editor. Writing words is as multiplicitous as the diversity of artistic expressions. There is no art without trauma. There is no trauma without life experience. This is what the curating experience tells us when we visit exhibitions and look at art works.
The first layer in the following visual and curatorial essay is one of the possible readings; it is not replacing the artists’ initial ideas and it is not disorienting the viewers’ gaze and reading from their relationship with art. Looking at the art as a reflection on society allows a closer connection to the present human condition.
This proximity with the initial idea of art means a radical rupture with the conventional presentation of art objects, and therefore from the exclusive spaces of display. In fact, art objects are containers of trauma and perceptions translated into materialised ideas.
The second layer is a thinking about exhibition making and curating in times of crises, reflecting on the ecological crisis and on social ecology. This is not new. The making of exhibitions and their presentation in museums creates a place where people of a city can see, in display cabinets and gallery space, objects and images brought form faraway places. The souk and marketplace were the fair and temporary museum of many cities: Baghdad, Marrakesh, Zanzibar, Venice, Constantinople, Mexico, and more recently, Paris, New York, and Shanghai. Arguably, exhibitions can fold together both such layers, uniting the origins of the objects’ meaning and experience of making, as well as the stories of the viewer, connecting production, imaginary and real, with spaces of encounter and experience.
LOOKING AT THE WORLD AROUND YOU


OUR WORLD IS BURNING


– Danh Vō, We the People (detail), 2011, copper, 265 x 236 x 133 cm
– Amal Kenawy, The Silent Multitudes, 2010, steel, LGP gas tanks, video, 300 x 600 x 400 cm
– Inji Efflatoun, Greeting to South Lebanon Bride, 1985, oil on canvas, 70 x 50 cm
– Mustapha Akrim, Sculptures-mots, 2019, 150 x 100 x 50 cm
Photo: Aurélien Mole






LOOKING AT THE WORLD AROUND YOU

GENERATION 00


OUR WORLD IS BURNING

MOROCCAN TRILOGY



TRIUMPHANT SCALE – CURATED BY OKWUI ENWEZOR


GENERATION 00

DR ABDELLAH KARROUM
Director of Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art
Abdellah Karroum has been the Director of Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha since 2013.
Karroum is the founder and artistic director of a number of art initiatives, including L’appartement 22 in Rabat, Morocco.
He has also curated numerous exhibitions, such as, most recently, <em>Moroccan Trilogy 1950- 2020</em> at MNCARS (Reina Sofia) in Madrid (2021), <em>Our World Is Burning</em> (2020) at Palais de Tokyo, Paris; <em>Revolution Generations</em> (2018), <em>Shakir Hassan Al Said: The Wall</em> (2017), <em>Wael Shawky: Crusades and Other Stories</em> (2015), <em>Farid Belkahia: Aube(s)</em> (2015), and <em>Shirin Neshat: Afterwards</em> (2014).
He was artistic director of <em>Inventing the World: The Artist as Citizen</em> for the Biennale Benin (2012); curator of <em>Sous nos yeux [Before Our Eyes] </em>at La Kunsthalle de Mulhouse, France (2013) and at the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (2014); and associate curator of <em>Intense Proximity</em> for La Triennale, Paris (2012).
Other curatorial and research projects Karroum has led include the Sentences on the Banks and other activities at Darat Al-Funun, Amman (2010); A Proposal for Articulating Works and Places for the 3rd Biennale of Marrakech (2009); the R22 art experimental web radio station established in 2007; Le Bout Du Monde art expeditions (ongoing since 2000); and the Editions hors’champs series of art publications established in 1999.
He received his PhD in Communication, Art and Performance from the Michel de Montaigne University, Bordeaux in 2001 with a dissertation titled “Nomadic Works: Towards a Post-Contemporary Art”. He is a regular contributor to specialised art publications.