From February 5 to 11, 2026, members of the C-MAP Africa group from The Museum of Modern Art traveled to Morocco on a research trip that included several cities: Marrakech, Casablanca, Rabat, Tangier, and Tétouan. Over the course of the visit, the group met with artists, curators, scholars, and cultural practitioners and toured studios, archives, museums, and independent initiatives. Upon their return, the travelers were invited to reflect on a single moment that shaped their experience and prompted them to reconsider their work at MoMA. Because these responses are intentionally brief, they do not fully capture the breadth of encounters that shaped the experience. 

The group extends its heartfelt thanks to Chahrazad Zahi, whose knowledge and good spirit were integral to the trip. The group also remains deeply grateful to the many artists, scholars, collectors, and cultural workers across Morocco who so generously shared their time, knowledge, and spaces with us, and whose hospitality and openness made the journey possible including but not limited to the following: Oumayma Abouzid, Amina Agueznay, Mustapha Akrim, Yto Barrada, Elisabeth Bauchet-Bouhlal, Amina Belghiti, Amina Benbouchta, Hicham Benohoud, Meriem Berrada, Khalil Binebine, Mahi Binebine, M’barek Bouhchichi, Hicham Bouzid, Nadia Chabâa, Larbi Cherkaoui, Kamal Daghmoumi, Florence Renault Darsi, Hassan Darsi, Touria El Glaoui, Safaa Erruas, Oumaima Haitof, Hassan Hajjaj, Laila Hida, Amine Houari, Abdellah Karroum, Imane Lahrich, Othman Lazraq, Mohamed Mourabiti, Amina Mourid, Mounia Yasmine O’Neal and the team at The Mothership Tangier: Khawla, Chef Mohamed, BaMjido, Othmane, Saïd, and Si Mohammed; Juan Asis Palao Gómez, Mehdi Qotbi, Karim Rafi, Younes Rahmoun, Sara Rerhrhaye, Nadia Sabri, Abderrahim Yamou, and Fatiha Zemmouri.

The 2026 C-MAP Africa trip was organized and researched by Beya Othmani, the C-MAP Africa fellow (2024–26).

Smooth Nzewi, The Steven and Lisa Tananbaum Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture, C-MAP Africa Group Leader

On Mohamed Chabâa 

The stewardship of an artist’s legacy is something I find deeply compelling, especially when it is taken on by family members. Nadia Chabâa, an art historian who has dedicated herself to her father’s legacy, stands out as a particularly inspiring example. Before our visit to her home, my knowledge of Mohamed Chabâa (1935–2013) was spotty and largely limited to his role in the triumvirate that founded the Casablanca Art School. But his contributions ran much deeper. He combined artistic practice, theory, and pedagogy, and architecture was at the heart of it all.

In 1966, Chabâa joined the Casablanca Art School as a teacher, leading workshops in decoration and graphic arts and establishing an Arabic calligraphy workshop as a core part of the curriculum. Alongside Mohamed Melehi (1936–2020) and Farid Belkahia (1934–2014), he co-organized Présence Plastique, a manifesto-exhibition held in Jemaa el-Fna Square in Marrakech in 1969, deliberately bringing art into public space.

In 1982, he joined the faculty of the National School of Architecture in Rabat, Morocco’s first architecture school, and in 1994, he returned to his alma mater, the National Institute of Fine Arts in Tétouan, as its director, overhauling both its Italian classical curriculum, which had been place since Chabâa was a student there in the 1950s, and its pedagogy. There, he shaped a generation of Moroccan artists now active on the international scene, including Younes Rahmoun and Safaa Erruas, both of whom we visited during our trip.

I was also quite impressed with how Chabâa’s own artistic practice evolved over the years, from hard-edge abstraction of the 1960s and 1970s to looser abstraction in the 1980s to more gestural lines from the late 1990s onward.

Ksenia Nouril, Assistant Director, International Program

C-MAP research trips typically culminate over a year’s worth of distance learning. They are an on-the-ground continuation of the dialogic, group-based learning practiced by C-MAP members at MoMA in their monthly meetings with artists, curators, and scholars, which are organized by the C-MAP fellow and the C-MAP group leader. Thus, our short but precious visit to Morocco was but one piece of a larger and longer-term project with deep roots in our institution’s mission to connect people to and through art.

This metaphor of piecing or putting together lends itself to the many ways of making we experienced in our multicity venture via plane, train, and automobile. I was particularly struck by the power of pattern, which emerged as a salient trope for artists with whom we met or whose works we saw on view at various venues. Whether it is the repetition of an iconic image in the works of Safaa Erruas or Hassan Hajjaj or the repetition of a shape or color in urban and religious architecture alike, such as at the Madrasa Ben Youssef, pattern permeated our visual field. Meeting with Amina Agueznay brought pattern into the conversation a different way, specifically through the traditional weaving patterns incorporated in her work Curriculum Vitae from 2020–21, which comprises dozens of blocks made by weavers from different communities across Morocco. Each block represents that weaver’s “language,” which is passed down from generation to generation and is either well known or endangered. Agueznay also showed us Burials, a work from 2024 that also meditates on waving as a language, creating parallels between words and stitches. 

Leonardo Bravo, Director of Public Engagement, Department of Learning and Engagement

The opportunity to travel to Morocco with the C-MAP Africa group felt like stepping into a long-held dream. Since my youth, Morocco has occupied a vivid place in my imagination—shaped by the mystique of North Africa, the wandering spirit of the Beats, and the hypnotic sounds of the master musicians of Jajouka.

To finally move through the country itself—along the vibrant streets of Marrakech, amid the coastal rhythms of Casablanca and the layered histories of Tétouan and Rabat, and across the luminous threshold of Tangier—was to encounter a reality even more compelling than the one I had imagined.

Across these cities, Morocco revealed itself as a landscape shaped over millennia, where culture and history unfold in layered and interconnected ways. It is a place continually formed and re-formed through the shifting currents of empire, colonization, and self-determination.

Particularly moving was the exhibition on Berber and Amazigh culture across the Maghreb at the Pierre Bergé Museum of Berber Arts, which offered a powerful testament to the grace, dignity, and resilience of these communities. The presentation underscored how Amazigh cultural traditions continue to resonate across generations and geographies.

Among the many memorable encounters during the trip, our visit to Think Tanger stood out. The work of Hicham Bouzid, Amina Mourid, and their collective—creating a platform for collaborative learning, research, and public inquiry—deeply resonated with my own interests. Their experimental, research-driven approach to collective knowledge-making at the intersection of arts, culture, and civic life closely aligns with my institutional work.

I left the visit inspired and hopeful about developing stronger connections that might lead to future collaboration with MoMA.

Oluremi C. Onabanjo, The Peter Schub Curator, The Robert B. Menschel Department of Photography

Our time in Morocco was sprawling in its scope, intensive in its sensibility. From Marrakech to Casablanca, then Rabat to Tétouan, our final day in Tangier remains crisp in my mind’s eye.

The night prior, we had visited Yto Barrada’s inimitable Cinémathèque Tangier—followed by a convivial dinner over which we discussed Morocco’s expanded presence at the forthcoming Venice Biennale (Barrada representing France; Amina Agueznay representing Morocco).

On a dewy, fragile morning, the group arrived at The Mothership, where we encountered the expanded fields of Barrada’s artistic and social practice. In ethos, The Mothership is a site for artistic retreat, experimental research, and interdisciplinary exploration inspired by natural dyes and Indigenous traditions. Physically, it consists of a series of studios and dwelling spaces occupied by visiting residents, collaborators, and Barrada’s family. These are threaded together and surrounded by a variety of flowering and subsistence gardens.

Situated on a dramatic set of cliffs that overlook the Strait of Gibraltar and face Spain, the view from the rear balcony of The Mothership is anchored by a massive tree. Here, Barrada has constructed a sturdy platform that one can access through netted passageways entangled among branches. She calls this her raft.

In considering this view, I was catapulted back to the first time I leafed through her photobook A Life Full of Holes: The Strait Project (2005)—a project that shaped my understanding of the stakes of contemporary photography in Morocco and which anchors MoMA’s photographic holdings of Barrada’s work.

Looking skyward at her raft, I was plunged back into the world of French social work pioneer and writer Fernand Deligny that Barrada had shaped at MoMA through Artist’s Choice: Yto Barrada—A Raft (2021–22), which was organized thoughtfully in collaboration with my colleague Lucy Gallun.

Still reeling from the loss of Jay Levenson—who has made, and continues to make, so much possible within and beyond MoMA—I was reminded of what it means to sustain an insistent generosity of spirit and a rigorous fidelity to life in all of its forms.

Thomas (T.) Jean Lax, Curator, Department of Media and Performance

Mother, Ship

Yto Barrada has been building rafts with others for over twenty years. Consider the tree house she made in 2005 in the garden of her Tangier home, which later that year she photographed and called Raft in Strangler Figtree. Or her 2021 tabletop sculpture—Tamo’s Raft (Le radeau de Tamo)—included in her Artist’s Choice exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art.

Yto’s rafts are rarely flat, much like the buoyant structures made of fastened materials used by migrants as makeshift boats. You don’t need me to recall images of Mediterranean migrants here for you to call to mind the morphological echoes between Yto’s assemblages and the vessels captured in photographs endlessly circulated via news and social media.

Those shapes are echoed in the meandering wires that wind atop Tamo’s ship and hover in the diagonal lines of ladders extending below the tree house and web of branches linking the two-hundred-year-old strangler fig tree to her house.

In this trail of associations, ghosted but not forgotten, a network of rafts seems to breed more floating platforms. There is a technical word for this type of vehicle: a mothership, designed to carry, lead, or serve other vehicles as they travel through water, air, and space.

Yto’s rafts tend to float in groups. To call them “Yto’s” rafts is itself a usable fiction. They are perhaps better described as our rafts; Yto keeps them company.

Michelle Elligott, Chief of Archives, Library, and Research Collections

Specificity, universality, transmission of ideas, connection, circulation, and yes, beauty.

Younes Rahmoun’s presentation at the Tétouan School of Fine Arts helped me reflect on the experiences, new ideas, and hope that were centered during this most enlightening trip to several cities in Morocco.

Formed and informed by his family tradition, and deeply rooted to his locality, Younes discussed his background and practice. I enjoyed learning about his Ghorfa (room) series in particular. With his mother’s support, he inhabited a small space under the stairs in the family home, which became his studio—a space for work and meditation. He translated that architectural space into a series of drawings, objects, and installations in various media.

Some installations appeared in gallery contexts, while others were situated in the landscape—but always with the artist’s intended desire for the viewers to concentrate on their “here and now.” His presentation also spurred me to contemplate the path to my current role, from my first art history courses at Smith College, where Younes had a residency and solo exhibition in 2024 that included his most recent Ghorfa, which he installed in the woods a few miles outside of campus.

The show was curated by Emma Chubb, who joined our meeting in Tétouan, and together we all toured the School of Fine Arts library and discussed the critical importance of collecting, preserving, and making accessible research materials, particularly of artists, populations, and regions that may be underrepresented in research institutions.

I am grateful to all the inspiring people we met throughout the trip, and I felt honored to think together with such wonderful MoMA colleagues, including our dear Jay Levenson, who helped open horizons for so many with his humor and humility.

Kate Lewis, The Agnes Gund Chief Conservator

I am very grateful to all the collectors, collectives, curators, publishers, researchers, and, of course, artists (including their families and colleagues) across Morocco who so generously welcomed us into their homes, studios, spaces, museums, galleries, and cinemas over the course of the 2026 C-MAP Africa research trip.

At MoMA, artists and makers are integral to the stewardship of the collections. A clear thread that emerged during this journey was how the process of making—of choosing materials and techniques, of collaborating with others—is deeply influenced by histories, religion, language, politics, and communities.

In the beautiful city of Tétouan, we were fortunate to visit Safaa Erruas in her downtown apartment studio. She shared with us her “ideas and materials from my internal kitchen” and talked about an artwork Les Drapeaux (2011–12).

This piece consists of the flags of the 22 Arab League member states reimagined as white pearls embroidered on sheets of 600 gsm cotton paper, reflecting on the Arab Spring.

Embroidery is a local tradition, passed down from mother to daughter, and the Tétouan practice is known for its stylized flowers and geometric shapes on unbleached canvas. It was interesting to hear how she worked with local embroiderers to create this painstaking work.

The multilayered significance of this approach and method reminded me that beyond materials and process, people are at the center of art and also, by extension, museum collections.

Jay Levenson embodied this ethos: Meet artists in their communities, where they are.

In memory of Jay Levenson (1948–2026), Director of MoMA’s International Program

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Following Algeria’s independence in 1962, a group of artists aspired to create a new visual idiom, one that could carry collective memory while moving beyond state-sponsored art movements—particularly Socialist Realism—and breaking away from colonial representations.² This impulse developed as a momentum shaped by the urgency to redefine modes of artistic production within a postcolonial framework. Among the designations used to describe it, the “School of the Sign” remains the most ambivalent, at once reductive and generative. The term itself is often misunderstood in two ways: First, it implies the existence of a unified movement based on a shared aesthetic. Second, it risks confining a broad concept to a form of formal nationalism, suggesting that the turn to the Sign is a retreat into identity or the revival of a dormant tradition.

The “School of the Sign” refers to a conceptual and material proposition concerned with how the Sign can be mobilized as a critical space through art and literature. Far from constituting a school in the institutional sense, it is more aptly understood as a constellation of artists who explored the “Sign”—a term they preferred to “letter” or “symbol”—as a dense visual structure capable of articulating a grammar of liberation.³ Guided by the thought of writer Jean Sénac, Algerian artists such as Mohamed Khadda (1930–1991; fig. 1), Choukri Mesli (1931–2017), Denis Martinez (b. 1941; fig. 2) and, later, Ali Silem (b. 1947) contributed to a conceptualization of the Sign as a palimpsest that is simultaneously abstract and situated, mystical and insurgent.⁴ This concept must also be considered in relation to the visual frameworks that have long shaped the reception of North African art, ranging from Orientalist projections to patrimonial models. Rather than reiterating colonial categories, these artists treated the Sign as a site of critical engagement against academic norms.

A central figure in Algeria’s postindependence cultural scene, Jean Sénac was primarily known as a poet and art critic, but he also played a crucial role as a mediator among artistic, intellectual, and political circles. In 1964, he founded Galerie 54, the first independent exhibition space in Algiers, which he conceived as a platform for experimental practices. Here, Sénac presented the work of artists such as Khadda and Martinez and coined the term “École du Noûn” (Noûn School). At the height of the postcolonial cultural revival, he made a first attempt at theorizing his observations, writing: “The Sign, rising from centuries past, from remote douars, from the songs of the meddahs [storytellers], bears witness to the permanence in the Maghreb of what could be called the École du Noûn.”⁵ The “École du Noûn,” according to him, arises from the sensuality of the letter noûn, drawing on its dual resonance as a sacred character in the Qur’an and a visual form associated with desire. Sénac’s interpretation posits the noûn as all at once a female breast,⁶ an open beginning, a Sufi promise, and a corpoème (body-poem)—the latter a figuration in which poetry and corporeality are inseparable. This fusion of corporeal pleasure and textual creation lies at the heart of his poetry.⁷

Rather than defining a unified movement, Sénac sought to name a shared sensibility he perceived across the practices of several artists. From the late 1960s onward, he increasingly referred to this sensibility as the School of the Sign. The Sign, in his view, constitutes a living matrix rooted in Algerian heritage while remaining open to contemporary invention. While some artists—most notably Mohamed Khadda—engaged closely with Sénac’s writings and shared his conviction that the Sign could catalyze an artistic renewal,⁸ others maintained a more distant or independent relationship to his theoretical framework. Indeed, the School of the Sign did not emerge as a self-declared collective or common agenda but rather as Sénac’s own critical reading of converging artistic trajectories connected through dialogue and proximity. Artists of the Sign drew inspiration from Amazigh and Arabic scripts, prehistoric petroglyphs, and vernacular forms, aspiring to create a simultaneity of heritage and revolution. They did this by, for example, fragmenting cursive letters into angular modules, overlaying layers of script until legibility dissolved, or embedding geometric motifs from woven textiles into abstract chromatic fields. 

The School of the Sign resonated with other artistic strategies in the region, such as Hurufiyya, an aesthetic movement that emerged among artists reinvesting ancestral signs as a means of resisting folklorization and gesturing toward plural modernities.⁹ Emerging across the Arab world from the late 1940s onward, Hurufiyya designated a broad tendency that reintroduced the Arabic letter into modern artistic practice, often emphasizing its calligraphic and spiritual dimensions. While artists associated with the School of the Sign shared this refusal of folkloric repetition, they approached the letter less as a calligraphic form and more as a destabilized visual structure displaced from its conventional function. The turn to rock paintings, desert lines, and marginal alphabets did not aim to produce a nostalgic aesthetic; rather, it sought to reactivate the semiotic depth of these forms by working their internal tensions between figuration and abstraction, legibility and opacity. In Algeria, this engagement developed largely outside formal Hurufiyya circles and was instead shaped by local postindependence debates and artistic networks. Later figures, such as Rachid Koraïchi (b. 1947), would more explicitly align with Hurufiyya principles, albeit within a different historical moment and a transnational framework.

The School of the Sign was not devoid of internal frictions—notably, artists debated the very definition of popular art. The tensions ranged, on the one hand, from opposition to approaches that understand popular art as a shared visual heritage to be stabilized and made socially legible to, on the other hand, positions that emphasized abstraction and formal experimentation as a necessary break from inherited and imposed models. Multiple approaches to the Sign coexisted without canceling one another. These divergences became particularly visible in the distinct ways individual artists positioned themselves in relation to abstraction, spirituality, and the use of the letter. Artists such as Abdallah Benanteur (1931–2017) gravitated toward lyrical abstraction infused with an Islamic sensibility.¹⁰

Born in Western Algeria, Benanteur followed an artistic path shaped by close personal and intellectual affinities rather than formal group affiliations. His long-standing friendship with Mohamed Khadda, forged in the mid-1940s when the two painted together around Mostaganem before traveling together to Algiers and later to France, was formative in this respect. Benanteur also maintained close ties with Jean Sénac, whose work he illustrated on several occasions and with whom he shared a commitment to postindependence cultural renewal.¹¹ Taken together, these relationships situate Benanteur within the same generational and cultural milieu as the artists associated with the School of the Sign, even though his practice gradually shifted toward a more autonomous lyrical abstraction.¹² His work draws on the iconoclastic heritage of Maghrebi Islam and articulates a dynamic sense of universality. Although he occasionally deployed letters in his work and engaged in debates surrounding the Sign, Benanteur remained wary of prescriptive frameworks, privileging an approach grounded in individual spirituality and a universal conception of modern art.¹³

For his part, Sénac emphasized the proximity and divergence of Benanteur and Khadda in terms of their relationship to the Sign and to Islamic visual heritage. Referring to Khadda’s audacity in “reintegrating the Signs into the Body”¹⁴ and seeking to “reincarnate the arabesque of his ancestors,”¹⁵ Sénac notes that Benanteur, for his part, “having started from the Sign, seems to want to preserve only its trace, its aura,” bringing the noûn back “to its point of preciseness,”¹⁶ whereas Khadda carried it toward a lyrical transcendence. This distinction sheds light on Benanteur’s singular position: situated within the same generational milieu, yet gradually moving toward a more autonomous and meditative abstraction.

Others, like Choukri Mesli (1931–2017), worked the letter as a sensual form in its own right, one saturated with ambiguity, and explored the representation of the female body. His engagement does not follow the conventions of the academic nude; it is an allegorical image of the nation itself, tattooed, inscribed, and resilient, carrying cultural memory and strength in the face of war and historical trauma.¹⁷ In the later Les Protectrices (1991), he continued to work the Sign in close relation to the female body, intertwining fragments of letters with corporeal forms (fig. 3). Here, writing does not appear as an autonomous calligraphic pattern but instead as an inscription borne by the figure itself—tattoo-like marks and the Arabic title al-ḥāmiyāt (the protectresses) fold the letter into the body, suggesting language as something carried and worn. The painting shows that even decades after the emergence of the School of the Sign, Mesli maintained an interest in the Sign as a lived and embodied language rather than a purely formal device.

Mohamed Khadda, by contrast, approached the Sign as a political project.¹⁸ In his collection of essays Éléments pour un art nouveau (1972), he insists on the need to create a plastic writing that is neither subjected to Western abstraction nor limited to a rigid tradition.¹⁹ This position was shaped in part by his experience as a typographer in France, as well as by his artistic training at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris, where he was exposed to modernist debates while remaining attentive to the materiality of writing. In this same collection of writings, Khadda describes his creative process as one shaped by layers, rhythm, the interplay of positive and negative spaces, and the tensions between surface and depth.²⁰ He emphasizes the plastic transformation of writing and its capacity to convey spiritual, poetic, and political dimensions, evoking letters as “male or female, solar or lunar,” and animated by a suggestive power akin to incantation.²¹

A photograph of Khadda’s atelier (fig. 4) provides a more concrete understanding of this process. This image shows a space filled with canvases at different stages, placed side by side and often overlapping. Signs reappear in one painting after another, shifting in scale and density. Tools and materials remain visible. The studio reflects a practice based on repetition, layering, and gradual transformation, which is consistent with Khadda’s background in typography and his sustained attention to the potentials of the Sign.

Some artists associated with the School of the Sign decided to further expand their reflection on the Sign by founding the Aouchem group (aouchem means “tattoo”) in 1967. Initiated by Denis Martinez, Choukri Mesli, and Mohamed Benbaghdad, among others, the group proclaimed in a groundbreaking manifesto that “the Sign is stronger than bombs.”²² Aouchem approached the Sign as a trace of ancestral gestures and collective memory. They drew from the prehistoric cave paintings of Tassili n’Ajjer, popular talismans, and sacred scripts, introducing a decolonial interplay between art and ritual. The group asserted a lineage that was both African and Arabo-Berber and bound together less by formal doctrine than by friendship. Aouchem was, above all, a circle of close friends who met regularly, particularly in Blida, where long discussions and moments in everyday life contributed to their cohesion. These ties were not limited to exhibitions: Members also collaborated on texts, radio programs with poets, and the drafting of the manifesto. Alongside their collective initiatives, they informally circulated symbolic gestures, such as emblems or amulets bearing the group’s name, without ever imposing a uniform aesthetic.

Jean Sénac, acting as a mentor, encouraged the inclusion of other Algerian artists, such as Baya (1931–1998) and Arezki Zerarti (1938–2024). He also played an important role as a mediator between artists and writers, maintaining close ties with members of the group and supporting the circulation of their work through exhibitions, publications, and broadcasts. In Algeria, where figuration could be perceived as either an academic colonial inheritance or propaganda, Aouchem chose abstracted figuration, opting for hybrid and interstitial creatures. Their refusal of both illustrative imagery and pure abstraction became a gesture of emancipation. The covers of the 1967 Aouchem exhibition catalogues (figs. 5, 6) reflect this stance. Both compositions bring together signs, fragmented figures, handwritten elements, and ornamental motifs, which are arranged without a clear hierarchy or focal point. Figurative references appear and dissolve without settling into a stable image or legible scene. Printed with a mimeograph, the catalogues preserve traces of their production: irregular lines, uneven lettering, visible overlaps. These material imperfections distinguish them from institutional graphic formats. The covers do not present a coherent visual statement; instead, they allow disparate marks, images, and gestures to coexist on the page.

Within Aouchem, the Sign became a means of activating a form of visual consciousness grounded in collective practice. While the group shared common concerns with the artists associated with the School of the Sign, it did not operate as its continuation. Rather, Aouchem developed in parallel, shifting the emphasis to material processes, ritual gestures, and collective experimentation. The materiality of the works themselves played a part in this effort. Some artists treated the canvas as a ritual surface, layered with ochers, earth, ash, natural pigments, and ink—materials that evoke an ancestral and vernacular register (such as henna or mineral earths), linking the pictorial gesture to imagined precolonial practices. For them, the Sign was no longer confined to drawing or inscription, but instead embodied in matter itself, making materials carriers of meaning. In addition to sourcing ancestral materials, Aouchem artists drew from their recent historical experience to develop a new vocabulary of the Sign. The barbed wire—a recurrent motif in the works of Denis Martinez, for example, emerged as a charged symbol: at once border, carceral memory, and visual marker of the constrained body.²³

Denis Martinez’s Le petit miroir (1967; fig.7) illustrates how the precepts of the School of the Sign materialized within Aouchem as an expanded artistic practice. The piece is a mixed-media assemblage made of three branches, animal bones, and paper, among other materials, and stands somewhere between an image and a sculpture. Across the surface, there are silver, calligraphy-like motifs—dots, geometric patterns, short gestural arabesques, and words drawn from Algerian dialect—that are placed on fractured planes and roughly human-shaped forms. These Signs do not organize themselves into writing; indeed, they remain dispersed, uneven, and materially present. The combination of painted wood and raised forms gives the Sign a totemic presence, grounding it in artisanal practice. Here, it is no longer conceived as a system of visual forms to be read, but rather as a physical presence embedded in the object itself. Freed from its function as writing and reconfigured as an element of the assemblage, the Sign emerges through matter and volume, extending its logic beyond the pictorial field into a material and experiential register.

Ali Silem is another Algerian artist who built on the concept of the Sign. He defended the idea of a Sign in motion and of an open visual alphabet that rejects both identity-based assignment and state appropriation. He once remarked, “When you take a bird’s feather, for instance, you notice that it has the shape of the [Arabic letter] alif.”²⁴ For him, the task was to move beyond the “School of the Sign” as a label or myth and to reimagine it as a fluid space of creation nourished by the friction between ancient forms and contemporaneity. While Silem’s work remains in dialogue with the concerns articulated by Mohamed Khadda and the artists associated with Aouchem, it unfolds along a distinct register. The Sign, in Silem’s view, does not reference a glorified past.²⁵ Moreover, although his practice—like that of Aouchem—reflects his interest in nonrepresentational Signs and a refusal of academic figuration, it is not positioned as a rupture and ritual confrontation. In one untitled work, for example, calligraphic fragments dissolve into color, rhythm, and painterly gestures, preventing the Sign from settling into meaning, keeping it in a state of visual flux (fig. 8).

Whereas Benanteur tended to preserve the Sign as an evanescent trace or aura, while Mesli embedded it within figuration, Silem approached the letter through restraint and compositional measure. As Khadda observed, Silem’s surfaces are structured by carefully “mastered trajectories,” a “cascade of noûn,” an “ascension of lâm,” and the discreet presence of alif as tutelary linear anchors, so that the Sign functions less as an embodied or atmospheric motif than as a controlled calligraphic architecture oriented toward balance and serenity.²⁶ For Silem, the Sign functions as a phenomenological event that is experienced before it is interpreted.²⁷ This emphasis on color, vibration, and poetic resonance is reinforced by the artist’s parallel activity as a poet, a pursuit he shares with artists such as Denis Martinez, for whom the Sign also circulates between visual and textual registers. In his lecture “Peintres et poètes d’Algérie,” Silem situated Algerian visual practice within a long continuum of “written stones” (hajarat el maktûba), where alphabets and drawings have been intertwined for millennia, and where contemporary artists continue to seek an embodied memory of inscription.²⁸ In this lecture, Silem reflected on the long-standing entanglement of poetry and painting in Algeria, situating contemporary practices of the Sign within an older culture of orality, and tracing the role of artist-poet collaborations and bibliophile editions in the postindependence period.

What is singular in the way these artists engage the Sign is its semiotic operation. It is neither purely symbolic (in the Saussurean sense) nor reducible to index or icon. Beyond repeating motifs from pre-Islamic, Islamic, or Amazigh visual repertoires, these artists have transformed the Sign into a language charged with symbolic meaning that has been polished and displaced from its original function. It is often syncretic, combining plastic elements from disparate image regimes—magico-religious, vernacular, calligraphic, modern—within an unstable grammar. The point for these artists was not to convey a clear message but instead to unsettle the gaze, to demand a mode of reading that remains open, partial, and unresolved. These practices echo critical semiotic theories (such as those of Roland Barthes or Umberto Eco), which consider the Sign not as a transparent translation of content but rather as a surface of friction between the visible and the sayable.²⁹

If the Sign once served as a tool of decolonization, it has also, over time, been absorbed, recontextualized, and periodically emptied of its initial function. The legacy of the so-called School of the Sign has been transmitted in fragmented ways—celebrated as a landmark of Algerian modernity, yet often reconstructed retrospectively through teleological narratives.³⁰ Over the decades, some artists have claimed this lineage. The very use of the term “school” has contributed to a partial museification of their artistic gestures, transforming what was a critical impulse into a closed chapter in the national art historical canon. This shift must also be understood within a broader context: the rise of postcolonial cultural policies, the globalization of art markets, and the rebranding of the Sign as a “cultural marker.” Displayed in this context, the Sign risks becoming precisely what it once resisted: an inert ornament rather than a living grammar of liberation. 

In this sense, the School of the Sign is more than just a historical episode or an art movement. It is a critical horizon ready to be reactivated within other struggles and that stands as a philosophy of making and an ethic of form. In his essay “Sur L’olivier,” Khadda compares the Sign to an ancestral olive tree: a living structure, as opposed to a fixed form, in a steady process of growth and resistance, continually reshaped by time and experience.³¹ For Khadda, the olive tree stands as a point of origin, a genesis from which Signs and writing emerge as traces (and not representations) bearing the memory of endurance, erosion, and continuity. With his conception of the Sign, Khadda proposes a method to inhabit Signs without either taming or submitting to them.

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Ashamallah was born in 1948, the year of the Nakba or “catastrophe,” a paradigmatic rupture that would change the course of history and redefine the trajectory of Egyptian nation-building.² Her life thereafter has been decidedly marked by events that punctuate the making of modern Egypt. Like many Egyptians, her sense of time is structured by presidential eras (Nasser, Mubarak), wars (the Six-Day War, Al Naksa, the War of Attrition), and agreements (Camp David, Oslo). These sweeping, large-scale, political shifts have reverberated in Ashamallah’s private life. Indeed, President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s nationalization policies impoverished her formerly middle-class family, and her brother’s martyrdom in the 1967 War of Attrition is a tragedy that has deeply afflicted her. 

Ashamallah grew up in Desouk, a provincial town in the Egyptian Nile River Delta region of Kafr-el-Sheikh, amid rural traditions that continue to influence her painting and drawing today. Though her Christian family was not originally from this region, they lived in Desouk because her father was assigned there to oversee life insurance policies. At home, her father’s library was rich with literature, which she pored over. Outside, she climbed sycamore trees, befriended the local livestock, and sang folk songs with the neighboring children. She planted rice and other seeds on her aunt’s land, fascinated by watching how plants grow and yield fruits for picking. Today, her imagination is still populated by the creatures, real and invented, that inhabited her early childhood. 

Against Canonization 

When prodded about the imaginative tropes in her work, Ashamallah sings a song that the village women would sing in a processional held at night during the lunar eclipse. Her artwork, which contains elements from Egyptian folklore and Pharaonic motifs—often hybridized alongside figments of her own imagination—offers novel interpretations of traditional forms. Ashamallah’s apartment is filled with paintings, and one that stands out is Hathour and Her Egg (1995), a large, prominent portrayal in her living room of the Pharaonic goddess Hathour (fig. 1). Ashamallah has been consistently preoccupied with the female figure and feminine prowess, as is evident in her depiction of Hathour, mother of all the Pharaohs and a goddess who represents the sky, motherhood, fertility, beauty, music, and joy. When asked what inspires these figures, she recounted a pivotal discovery: that the female mantis eats her partner by decapitating it after they have mated. Though Ashamallah did not elaborate further, it makes sense that the violence and beauty inherent to the natural process of mantis-mating could have inspired her to depict insect-like creatures as well as women with plants or other creatures inside their bellies. For Ashamallah, the female body is the touchstone of creation, the alpha and omega.³
 

It is challenging to attach Ashamallah to a particular school or “ism”—Expressionism, Primitivism, Surrealism. Instead, she weaves in and out of these styles at whim, eluding categorization by reworking forms that present her unique worldview. Though she received highly formal Beaux Arts–style training, she often surrenders her traditional education to follow the lead of her imagination. Her compositions present the world as she remembers it: full of trials and tribulations and marked by the simultaneity of euphoria and desolation. As an artist, her confidence in her own vision has always been steadfast. She recounts being on a field trip in middle school and visiting the Fine Arts Library. When her friend asked her, “Have you seen Picasso?” she responded, “Who is Picasso? I am Evelyn Ashamallah.” 

Her politics are seldom explicitly manifest in her artwork, though on certain occasions, she has illustrated specific political events, such as the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre or the ongoing genocide in Gaza (fig. 2). Nevertheless, most of her paintings and drawings are not didactic. When looking back on her body of work, it is difficult not to read certain pieces as parallels to the large-scale political transformations taking place in the background at the time they were made. Compositions featuring peasants tilling their land or astronauts (fig. 3), aliens, and UFOs evoke societal changes such as the 1952 Land Reform Law, which redistributed Egypt’s arable land, or the establishment of a national space program in 1960. 

As a young artist, Ashamallah found herself caught in the 20th-century gestation of a new republic. She graduated from the Painting Department of the Faculty of Fine Arts in Alexandria in 1973 and then moved to Cairo. There, not yet fully embracing her painting practice, she worked as a journalist for Rūz al-Yūsuf, a weekly political magazine that had just begun distribution in the Gulf countries. Her first piece, published in August 1973, was on the bride economy between the Gulf and Egypt. As an investigative journalist, she shed light on cases of newly wealthy Arabs from Saudi Arabia and the Emirates who would come to various rural places across Egypt and purchase young girls to bring home as wives. After this fearless debut, she earned a living by writing similar political, investigative editorial pieces until a disagreement with her editor led her to find work elsewhere. In 1977, the Egyptian government issued a warrant for Ashamallah’s arrest for her alleged involvement in leftist political activity. Forced to leave the country until they were no longer targets of the Egyptian state, she and her husband, journalist Mahmoud Yousri, moved to Algeria, where they lived in exile for six years. While she would not return to journalism, she was always involved in her husband’s editorial work and has remained an avid writer. Later in her practice, she began incorporating her writings into her artwork.

During one of our interviews, I asked Ashamallah about her relationship to politics after the 2011 uprising in Tahrir Square, in which she played a prominent role as a leading dissident and organizer. She discussed how, in retrospect, almost fifteen years later, she sees “how naive and blind we were, how we didn’t understand anything.”⁴ Now, after a lifetime of involvement in different political groups—ranging from leftist to Marxist to Socialist to Communist throughout regime changes and political fluctuations—Ashamallah wants her artwork to be free of political determinations and social burdens. As she explained to me, “They’re free to politicize whatever they want. For me, what do I do? What is good for me to do? I paint. Let me paint.”⁵
 

Exile and Early Drawings

In our discussions, Ashamallah referenced multiple times how the farmers’ fields inspired her developing visual language as a young girl.⁶ Despite this, she did not demonstrate interest in landscape painting while a student in Alexandria. Instead, she preferred riding the tram all day long and watching—and drawing—the hustle-bustle. It was not until she arrived in Tiaret, Algeria, in 1977 and encountered the topography of the agricultural province that she began drawing landscapes. Before traveling to Algeria, she had never seen such majestic hillsides. Given the flat, agricultural lands of her childhood, she was captivated by the different elevations in her first landscapes, which are often rendered in flat compositions with multiple planes stacked on top of each other. This compositional structure has remained present throughout her work, as she still typically divides the surface—whether cardboard, canvas, or paper—into sections that she then populates with original forms.

Landscape in Algeria (1980) is made of quasi-organic, geometric shapes that are common in her other illustrations from this time (fig. 4). Inspired by local crafts within the Amazigh tradition, Ashamallah borrowed certain forms that suited her desire to blend human figures with bushes, and trees with architecture. This hybridization is a constant throughout her artistic practice, whereby people are depicted with plantlike traits, and animal-creatures float in boundless spaces, undisturbed by the laws of perspective or gravity. 

In Algeria, Ashamallah’s husband only found sporadic work as a schoolteacher, and so they struggled to make ends meet. Though she never stopped drawing (“not even for one day”), it was a rare joy for her to receive colors, and when she did, she gravitated toward the saturated tones that she would later use in her acrylic works. 

When they moved from Tiaret to the capital of Algiers, Ashamallah developed a tight-knit community of friends from the political, intellectual, and artistic milieus across the Arab region—Syria, Palestine, Iraq, and, of course, Algeria. She was influenced by many of the conversations that took place at this time. The Algerian modernist artist Mohammed Khadda states in his essay “Elements for a New Art,” which he wrote fresh out of the Algerian War (1954–62) in 1964, “Our country is taking the socialist path, and the artist—like the worker and the peasant, has a duty to participate in the edification of this new world, in which man will no longer exploit man.”⁷ Though Ashamallah never directly references Khadda—except for in a side conversation in which she notes his calligraphic forms with admiration—it is clear that Ashamallah shares some of the concerns he waged in the formation of the new independent Algeria. She was inspired by the goings-on around her and has spoken extensively about the importance of her time in Algeria in her personal life and artistic trajectory.

In 1984, Ashamallah returned to an Egypt that was fundamentally different from the country she had left: one that was rife with economic disparity, increasingly common sectarian clashes, and a new age of political repression under the leadership of President Hosni Mubarak. Nevertheless, determined to support her children and continue making art, Ashamallah engaged with formal cultural apparatuses, staging exhibitions in state-run venues such as the Cairo Atelier (1986), among others. In the 1990s, she served as director of the Mohamed Nagy Museum in Giza before becoming director of the Museum of Modern Egyptian Art in Cairo. In 2011, she left this post, emphatically exposed the corruption within the Ministry of Culture, and took to Tahrir Square. 

The Rural Trace

Now, as Ashamallah has lived longer in the dense urbanity of Cairo than in its rural environs, she continues to derive inspiration from the landscape that defined her youth. It is there that she identifies the “Egyptian spirit” in its truth and essence. This portrayal of the rural as the “essence” of the nation, and the peasant as the “true Egyptian,” defined art historical, literary, and political debates in Egyptian modernism throughout the 20th century. In 1911, the newly established Egyptian Faculty of Fine Arts opened with a European curriculum and the following aim: “After having taught the students the conventional rules of each art, the professors shall endeavour to develop in them a taste for a national art, that which should become the expression of the modern civilized Egyptian. This will be thanks to what is available to them through the remarkable examples they see of Egyptian monuments and relics and of the Golden Age of Arab art.”⁸

Egyptian modernists responded to this prompt by representing the rural Egyptian, a figure that could potentially unite a heterogeneous population seeking a national identity.⁹ As did the artists Mahmoud Saïd (1897–1964), Seif Wanly (1906–1979) and his brother Adham Wanly (1908–1959), Ragheb Ayad (1892–1982), Mahmoud Naghi (1888–1956), Hamed Owais (1919–2011), and Injy Aflatoun (1924–1989) before her, Ashamallah identified the rural condition as the ultimate, defining feature of Egyptian society. Like them, she occupied an insider-outsider position, portraying the peasant from close proximity though never fully occupying the role herself. 

In the scramble to locate a static Egyptian national identity, images of peasants and the agricultural landscape they tilled—an unchanging constant across dynasties, kingdoms, and empires of rule—became a fixture in Egyptian artistic representation of the 20th century.¹⁰ From Mahmoud Said’s 1938 portrait Fille à l’imprimé (Girl in a Printed Dress) to Mahmoud Mokhtar’s 1930 sculpture Au Bord du Nil (On the Banks of the Nile) or Injy Aflatoun’s 1963 L’Or Blanc (White Gold), the Egyptian modernists were obsessed with portraying the “ordinary Egyptian” in a rural setting. There is no doubt that this practice was highly influential in Evelyn Ashamallah’s work, with some of her early works portraying women as abstract, organic figures that resemble Mokhtarian sculptures. 

In 1986, Ashamallah borrowed from the tropes of peasant representation (for example, the jagged portraiture of Hamed Oweais and the rural stereotypes of Ragheb Ayad) in Portrait or Analysis of the features of the Egyptian peasant, a profile sketch with a pseudo-Pharaonic phrenology (fig. 5). While this portrait borrows from Ashamallah’s antecedents, it also demonstrates the germination of some of her signature features: the almond-shaped hollow eyes and large skull. Over time, she further developed her own typologies of representation, departing from the rural depictions typical in the work of earlier Egyptian modernists.

In her 1990 drawing The Peasants’ Hope, Ashamallah employs the signature stacked composition she used in her early Algerian landscapes to completely recast a tired and pernicious rural trope (fig. 6). In the left of the composition, a woman with curly hair and an earring in the form of a striped bird diving downward is rendered in closeup profile above an underworld inhabited by part-sea part-human creatures, who swim toward a twirling structure at the surface. Above it, a central figure is positioned in the typical Pharaonic stance, wherein the feet point in one direction, and the body and head face the viewer. This figure also wears bird-like jewelry as well as a snake on its head. On the right, the artist stacks three figures on top of each other to make one hybrid creature: a crouching man, a bird-woman, and a flower-child. Each figure in this totemic trio relates to a figment from Ashamallah’s memory. Free from the stereotypical tropes that were common in the work of her predecessors, Ashamallah portrays what she knows about Egyptian peasants. Perhaps her renderings are acts of subversion, but it is more likely that they are forms of fantastical futurity, pointing to a time when humans, animals, land, sea, and sky will have all collapsed into an incongruent harmony.  

Throughout the 1990s into the early 2000s, Ashamallah dove further into the interspecies realms that had long populated her imagination. In the work from this period, we can begin to identify recurring motifs, including femininity, motherhood, and birth, which are conveyed by pregnant creatures or by characters contained in eggs, and womanhood in the form of reptilian beings with full breasts. These works almost always contain an unbridled articulation of humor and whimsy. As time progressed, Ashamallah depicted her figures with more limbs, tails, and fins, and she portrayed their encounters with even more levity. In her droll renderings, she would imagine conversations between different species that, as she has stated, “are not so easy to understand.” In her painting Balance (1993), we see her signature saturated colors deployed in the portrayal of four figures spilling over four quadrants of a composition (fig. 7). A turnip-headed red boy lies on his stomach and swings his feet next to a blue star creature with red lips, who smiles directly at the viewer. On the bottom of the composition, another red boy balances a reptilian figure in his mouth and an upside-down pyramid on his foot. As in Ashamallah’s other works, the composition is split and stacked, with each section containing a creature floating in its own respective world, yet brought into conversation with the other creatures in their whimsical portrayal.

In the fall of 2024, Ashamallah’s largest retrospective opened at Azad Art Gallery in Cairo’s Zamalek neighborhood. Titled The Harvest of a Lifetime, this exhibition was organized by decade, demonstrating Ashamallah’s evolution as an artist and offering unfettered access to her phantasmagorical world.¹¹ In some ways, Ashamallah’s ongoing legacy fits squarely into an art historical evolution of Egyptian modernism that draws key articulations from the rural. However, her representations offer something much more alluring than those of her predecessors. In reading her paintings and drawings alongside her writings, her exile, her political engagement, and then her disengagement, it becomes clear that her imagination is her antidote to the injustices that she has borne witness to throughout her life. She knows that this world-building is not entirely her own creation, as it follows the folktales and customs that surrounded her as a child. Now, looking back on a life laden with the contradictions, affiliations, and disaffiliations not uncommon to those navigating the rubble of the 20th century, Ashamallah consciously returns to the land, still, still invigorated by the potential of its promise (fig 8). 

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The annual Asilah Cultural Moussem, an international festival held in northern Morocco, was cofounded in 1978 by Mohamed Benaïssa and Mohamed Melehi in collaboration with Toni Maraini and Al Muhit Cultural Association. It served as a significant postcolonial cultural platform, involving activists from the Casablanca Art School and artists from Africa, the Arab world, Asia, Europe, and the Americas. The festival featured outdoor exhibitions, murals, visual art workshops, theater, music, and social and cultural programs aimed at rehabilitating the neglected city of Asilah and integrating art into social progress and daily life. The Asilah Cultural Moussem is still ongoing to this day.

Morad Montazami: Toni, to start the conversation, can you tell us how the idea of creating a festival of murals in Asilah—literally on the city’s walls (fig. 1)—came to you and Mohamed Melehi?

Toni Maraini: Firstly, I would like to mention that Mohamed Benaïssa was with us from the outset. Melehi and Benaïssa were born in Asilah, and our mutual friendship had blossomed many years before under various circumstances. Back when we were teaching at the Casablanca Art School in the 1960s, Melehi and I frequently traveled to Asilah, where we met Benaïssa. At that time, Asilah’s old medina was in poor condition; walls were deteriorating, many houses were abandoned, and the streets were quite dirty. When we got together with Benaïssa, we often discussed how we could contribute to the community’s cultural and economic development. Our goal was to enhance Asilah’s living standards, and for this, we thought about creating a festival. However, instead of calling it a “festival,” we decided to call it a “moussem,” the term traditionally used in Morocco for local festivities organized by the community. Thus, the Asilah Moussem needed to be community-driven from the outset. This is how the concept of a moussem emerged. Fortunately, there were elections during this time, and both Benaïssa and Melehi had campaigned for local office. Their active involvement in various community projects sparked enthusiasm among the residents,  and they were voted in: Benaïssa was elected mayor, which was a significant milestone for Asilah’s political landscape, and Melehi was elected member of the municipality and took on a prominent cultural role, creating a group called Al Muhit Cultural Association. This cultural association represented a fresh start, marking a new chapter in the city’s history. Concurrently, the Ministry of Culture provided funding to restore the city’s walls and its long-neglected houses. This was when the vision of visible walls took form.

MM: This photo conveys a sense of how artists organized and assigned the walls for painting. 

TM: Take a look at the state of the walls in this image (fig. 2). The house you see in the background was abandoned. Fortunately, we had numerous friends who were artists. We forged these connections through our involvement in the Casablanca Art School and through various other activities,¹ including organizing a series of public outdoor exhibitions—Présence Plastique—on the streets of Marrakech and Casablanca.² These artists participated with great dedication. In figure 2, we see them walking around the medina, deliberating on which area to tackle.

Artists were organized into six groups, with each one focusing on a specific location. The walls would initially be painted white, and then each artist would create a composition with the assistance of local young people. Everyone collaborated regardless of gender and age. Take, for example, this mural by Mohammed Chabâa (fig. 3; see also fig. 1). In the photograph, you can see Chabâa himself, but there is also someone assisting him. The wall was painted white, and the streets have been cleaned.

MM: Toni, you pointed out your experience with collaborative methodologies, dating back to the renowned Présence Plastique outdoor exhibition series held in Marrakech and Casablanca in 1969. Therefore, by the time of the Asilah moussem, roughly a decade later, you all had had experience with public space exhibitions. Could you elaborate on the specificity of the Asilah Cultural Moussem and the unique interactions that it fostered between artists and the local community?

TM: First of all, it differed in that in Jemaa el-Fna Square, paintings were hung on the walls of a large, unique public space. Here in Asilah, murals were created on the walls in various corners and city streets. The enthusiasm of the people was enormous, as they would pitch in to help with the painting.

MM: Did local people spontaneously join the mural collaboration, or had you planned for these murals to involve the local community?

TM: As muralists, we naturally considered the principles of street art. It needs to be in public spaces, contributing to urban development, and involving people’s participation. This is why, when working with Benaïssa on the concept of the Moussem, Melehi and I proposed a special art and culture project with three components: workshops, exhibitions, and street art.

MM: And can you tell us about the role of the local inhabitants, especially women? When we examine some of the photographs taken by you and Melehi, we can see many women collaborating on the murals.

TM: Yes, many female students had gathered to create their walls, and older women would come around to look, offering suggestions and help (fig. 4). That was indeed socially important. It sparked interest and friendship and, moreover, it reflected the female community’s desire to turn to more modern habits and experiences, changing from what Asilah was and engaging for better local conditions.

MM: Yes, as you say, apparently the local inhabitants understood the project, and there was some sort of synergy between the project, the city’s state, and how local people responded with enthusiasm and positivity to the Moussem, which brings me to my next question: Was Asilah already a tourist destination in 1978, or did it become one after the creation of the Moussem?

TM: Before the 1970s elections, Asilah was in such poor condition that it only drew a transient crowd—people who would briefly visit and then leave. The restaurants were shut down, and there was nothing to offer visitors. However, after 1978, Asilah’s economic situation improved significantly as shops started to open. Artisans, both men and women, would now sell their products, like rugs and ceramics. The weekly market became a gathering place for people from the countryside to sell their goods—vegetables, tomatoes, and many other products from nearby farms and fields. It was always crowded and very animated. The streets were cleaned, and many shops and houses reopened. Two traditional restaurants (one owned by a woman) opened as well. All of this attracted tourists, who came to see the murals. A museum was also established in the ancient Portuguese Al-Kasbah Tower, where some exhibitions were organized. These significant changes encouraged thoughtful tourism—tourism that pauses, observes, and values. Eventually, as people’s income improved, local families found it easier to send their children to school.

MM: Let’s discuss the workshops that featured so many key artists, especially in such a cosmopolitan environment. Can you tell us how these workshops were organized? I know, for instance, that the printmaking workshop was very significant.

TM: There was a painting workshop that welcomed artists of different nationalities and offered lessons to the youth from the city, but the printmaking workshop (fig. 5) was particularly significant, thanks to three outstanding artists, Mohammad Omar Khalil, Krishna Reddy and Robert Blackburn, who were experts in the field and supervised the workshop activities for several years. They coordinated all aspects, secured all the printing machines, etc. The printmaking workshop was the first of its kind in Morocco. Several artists, such as Farid Belkahia and Malika Agueznay (fig. 6), came to learn how to print their own works on paper, and over the years, they engaged in teaching these techniques to local students.

MM: How and when did you and Melehi connect with Mohammad Omar Khalil, Krishna Reddy and Robert Blackburn?

TM: We became acquainted with them during our stay in New York from 1962 to 1964. Melehi had been awarded a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, and I had been given a scholarship to Smith College. While in New York, visiting exhibitions and participating in cultural meetings, we became good friends with several artists.

MM: So you actually knew these artists for almost 18 years before inviting them to Asilah. That’s impressive!

TM: In those years, we traveled to New York several times, and met them again, and we became friends. The Moussem was a good occasion to invite them to Morocco. Given our collaborations on projects associated with the Casablanca Art School and international exhibitions or meetings, we also traveled to Baghdad, Lebanon, Tunis, Algiers, France, and Spain, and met many other artists. It was a fascinating cosmopolitan time that fostered numerous international, cultural, and artistic connections. Unlike today, there was a positive atmosphere, one characterized by a strong desire to collaborate in every direction—north, south, east, and west.

MM: It’s evident that our current fascination with the 1960s and 1970s, along with the broader postcolonial networks and solidarities, indicates we are facing challenges today. This suggests that our solidarities and networks clearly have limitations, and we need to draw our inspiration from that era.

TM: Exactly. There were no borders at that moment.

MM: Could you remind us if international artists were invited to the first edition, or if the 1978 edition primarily featured Moroccan artists—with international artists being invited starting from the second edition?

TM: Since our initial concept was to conduct local activities with an international approach, fostering connections between the north and south, east and west, and of course, Africa, the first edition was absolutely international (fig. 7) . . .

MM: For example, if I recall correctly, the first time you met Etel Adnan was around the time of the First Biennale of Arab Art in Baghdad in 1974. Four years later, she came to Asilah. I mean, there was a very strong dialogue and an artistic friendship between you and Adnan, as you even translated some of her poems into Italian.

TM: Yes, over the years, I translated and published three of her books and several poems in Italy. I also wrote for the catalogues of a couple of her exhibitions. As you say, I met Etel Adnan in 1974 at the Baghdad biennale, which I attended with Melehi and Belkahia. Since she told us she wanted to visit Morocco, we invited her in 1978; she visited Asilah, traveled around, had an exhibition in Rabat, and then in 1979, came again to participate in the Moussem painting workshop.

MM: There were printmaking workshops, painting workshops, and ceramics workshops, right? Who were the main participants practicing in these workshops? Were they mostly young Moroccan artists from Asilah? Obviously, many incredible artists came together, like Etel Adnan, Mona Saudi, and Malika Agueznay—all the ones we mentioned. But who were the workshop practitioners? Were they young people from Asilah or even youth from other Moroccan cities coming to Asilah in the summer?

TM: The workshops were open to everyone. Some of the artists invited would be responsible for organizing workshops and teaching programs. Artists from many countries would work at the workshops, as did young people from Asilah, including some who came from Tangiers or Rabat. Workshops were a great place for artistic convergences, not only for painting, sculpture, and ceramics but also for learning printmaking, as it was, at that time, the only place to learn it in Morocco (fig. 8).

MM: So this was a poster exhibition (fig. 9), right? Can you tell us if there was a direct relationship between the printmaking workshop and such displays? Were the works on display there mainly by artists who took part in the workshops, or were there other printmakers?

TM: This poster exhibition was held with works made for the occasion by the artists participating to the painting and printmaking workshops. The wide exhibition space was once an abandoned factory that had been restored. It became a very important municipal gallery called “Al-Qasaba,” where many exhibitions have been held over the years.

MM: Were you the curator of this exhibition?

TM: The art exhibitions were curated collaboratively! Certainly, Melehi and I would participate in their conception, yet much of the work was made possible thanks to the collaboration with the new local association called “Al Muhit,” created by Melehi and Benaïssa with the enthusiastic participation of other friends and people from Asilah, Tangier, and Rabat.

It is important to remember that during the Moussem there were not only the workshops and exhibitions, but also many other different projects—conferences, music and theater rehearsals, film screenings, and all the while street art activities. Every day, women and men worked hard and collectively to make all this happen. This is what the Moussem was intended to convey: a collaborative effort that showcased the dynamic enthusiasm of the community.

MM: OK, I get it. So there was never really one person, for example, responsible for the poster exhibitions; it was always a collective effort.

TM: As a newly elected member of the city council, Melehi was responsible for cultural activities. He would work from morning to evening on everything related to the arts, and I would help—but, as I said, without the participation of work groups and the great collective force, it would have been impossible to realize these cultural, artistic, and social projects concretely.

MM: It’s quite clear that you and Melehi were significant driving forces, albeit within a collective framework. Additionally, you both stood out as key figures in fostering connectivity, effectively bringing together artists from diverse backgrounds and countries in Asilah.

In the children’s workshop, you played a crucial role. I know you always tell me not to exaggerate your contributions, but in this case, it was definitely you who raised the idea of creating workshops for children. I’m aware that your experience with children and art pedagogy goes back further, as you had already been involved in art therapy, even in schools in Casablanca in the early 1970s. Can you share how the concept of children’s workshops and art pedagogy became so meaningful for you, and how you later implemented it in Asilah?

TM: When I was teaching at the Casablanca Art School, I also wanted to do something for younger audiences and the public schools. In 1976, I was asked by the headmistress of the Ibn Abbad school—a public school in a neglected neighborhood in Casablanca—to organize a free art workshop there. It turned out to be a great experience not only for me but also for the students, who joined with enthusiasm and, in many cases, did much better in their studies and their behavior as a result. That prompted me to study art therapy. In fact, every art historian knows that art serves as a form of therapy. I had a good friend, the psychiatrist Abdallah Ziou Ziou, who encouraged me and with whom I often exchanged ideas. Then, I had the opportunity in 1980 to open an art therapy workshop at the Children’s Hospital Ibn Rochd in Casablanca for two years. That was a great responsibility but also a fantastic experience.

MM: Did you implement the children’s workshop beginning with the first edition of the Moussem?

TM: Yes, since the very beginning . . . and I didn’t want the artists to join and teach . . . there was nothing to teach. The children would teach the artists (fig. 10)!

MM: The workshop’s approach was that we shouldn’t try to teach them anything; rather, they can teach us something.

TM: Certainly! They have valuable lessons to teach us and share. The issue was that at their school, students were asked to copy images, and instead of letting them express themselves, the children would have their drawings severely judged and corrected. During the first week, the first month, and the very first years of the Moussem, the doors of my workshop—which was organized in an open space between the street and the garden of the Raissouni Palace—were wide open, welcoming children and teenagers, boys and girls, from the streets and the neighborhoods around. They came, some from very poor backgrounds, others not. They came in, stayed, and played. Initially, there were approximately 20 children, and within two years, the number grew to around 200, possibly even 250 (fig. 11).

MM: Many of these children seem to have attended the workshop consistently over the years. Some of them you followed over the years; it wasn’t a one-time meeting. I believe you worked with several of them for many years, which implies that you saw some of them grow up, correct?

TM: Yes, many attended the workshop for many years; they literally grew up in it! And I kept in touch with them. Many have become excellent artists and some, art teachers. They still write to me, which is the most important thing. If somehow over the years, my name was forgotten by the Moussem’s organizers, young people who attended my workshops did not forget me …

MM: I’m curious to hear your thoughts on the independence of the Asilah Cultural Moussem compared to other more formal postcolonial festivals, which seemed more state-organized. For instance, the First World Festival of Black Arts in Dakar in 1966 was state-organized and highly political, as was the Baghdad biennale of 1974. Similarly, the Pan-African Cultural Festival in Algiers in 1969 had a distinctly centralized organization, despite its international character. Given that the Asilah Moussem was organized on a citywide scale rather than as a state-run event, was it more independent or less political from an official standpoint?

TM: We attended the Bagdad biennale of 1974 with Melehi—as the artists related to the Casablanca Art School representing Morocco. We attended the Pan-African Cultural Festival in Algiers in 1969 as well. All these events were fantastic artistically, but they indeed felt overtly political and official. Consequently, there were independent artist groups engaged in protest, like the Aouchem artist collective in Algeria and others. Asilah was different because it was organized locally by the municipality and the Al Muhit Cultural Association, and it involved local people primarily—this is why it was important to call it a moussem and not a festival.

MM: It’s quite interesting that it was just as international as in Algiers. It matched the internationalism of those earlier festivals, but the organization operated on a different scale. And, as you mentioned, it felt more local and grounded in some way, perhaps. So I believe it’s a very intriguing point regarding the originality of the Asilah Moussem within the broader context of postcolonial platforms, festivals, and transnational solidarities.

This conversation took place at a meeting of the Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives (C-MAP) Africa group at MoMA in September 2024. The 2024 C-MAP Africa research program was conceived and organized by Beya Othmani (C-MAP Africa Fellow) and Ugochukwu-Smooth Nzewi (Steven and Lisa Tananbaum Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture, and leader of the C-MAP Africa Group). Read more about C-MAP here

The post The Asilah Cultural Moussem: Tricontinental Meeting Points, Toni Maraini in conversation with Morad Montazami appeared first on post.

Early press reviews of Niati’s exhibitions highlight the artist’s focus not only on gender and violence but also on sound. A review of a group exhibition at the Galerie M’hamed Issiakhem (March 8–April 10, 1987) in Algiers that included artworks by Niati alongside those by Hamida Chellali, Akila Mouhoubi, and Baya Mahieddine notes the artist’s focus on sound or, rather, its absence. “Women are at the heart of Houria Niati’s inquiry. The twelve pastel works on paper and the four paintings on canvas all take the woman as their main subject or, more precisely, the suffering of a woman,” the author observes before adding that the paintings make palpable the “forced silence” to which women have been subjected.² The article draws readers’ attention to the “silence” and “imprisonment” that are discernible in Niati’s depictions of women, many of whom are shown in inhospitable spaces populated by sharp-toothed hybrid creatures and floating masks—as in The Last Words Before the Long Voyage (fig. 1), an oil pastel from 1982. In other works from the same series, which is titled Delirium, women are shown confined in black rectangular and arch-shaped spaces or reclining next to a window and looking into the starry night. Some float through an abstract space in menacing proximity to serpents. The lack of interaction with other figures and their visible solitude submerges them in an overwhelming silence. Yet, while The Last Words Before the Long Voyage depicts a solitary figure surrounded by dangerous-looking animals, the title references the words spoken prior to embarking on a mysterious journey. In fact, sound in the form of poetry and music would become key aspects of Niati’s artistic practice, in effect “activating” the paintings.

The artist is perhaps best known for her series of paintings No to Torture (fig. 2), which she completed as an undergraduate at Croydon College of Art in the United Kingdom in 1982. Recently shown at Tate Britain in the exhibition Women in Revolt!: Art and Activism in the UK, 1970–1990 (November 8, 2023–April 7, 2024), this series is composed of a first painting depicting four women that is displayed alongside four other paintings, each of which focuses on one of the figures. Shackled at their ankles, their faces wounded by rapid incisions, the figures, the artist suggests, personify all women who have suffered colonial torture.³ The thick layers of paint and repetition of the figures across multiple canvases can be read as the artist’s persistent attempt to recover the tortured bodies without concealing the violence they were subjected to. Indeed, the dark smudges of paint that indicate their faces raise alarm about the aggression experienced by Algerian women during the war at the hands of French soldiers.⁴ No to Torture is a direct reference to two Orientalist paintings by Eugène Delacroix (French, 1798–1863), both of which are titled Women of Algiers in Their Apartment, from 1834 and 1849, respectively. Niati’s work retains Delacroix’s composition but replaces his soft, blended brushstrokes with dynamically applied paint and deep incisions—an expression of anger at colonial injustice and violence, Niati explains.⁵

The solitude of the individual women in each of the four canvases makes the silence of incarceration palpable. Even the group painting does not reveal signs of conversation between the women, whose faces are rendered in a highly abstract way, with the green figure’s head immobilized by a rectangular shape that resembles a birdcage. Coincidentally, Niati completed No to Torture only two years after the Algerian writer Assia Djebar published a collection of short stories titled Women of Algiers in Their Apartment (1980). In her introduction, Djebar points to the formidable absence of sound in Delacroix’s artwork, arguing that the women abruptly stopped their conversation when the door opened and the painter walked in. “Sound has truly been severed,” Djebar writes, adding that “only in the fragments of ancient murmuring do I see how we must look for a restoration of the conversation between women, the very one that Delacroix froze in the painting.”⁶ It seems significant, then, that Niati often integrates sound in her paintings and installations, reciting her own poetry and singing Arab-Andalusian songs in front of her works in an attempt to complement the visual experience with a sonic one. While Tate only exhibited one of the paintings, and Niati did not perform in the gallery space, the display of No to Torture at the exhibition Forces of Change: Artists of the Arab World at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC, in 1993 was accompanied by the artist’s recitation of her poem “Delirium,” which played from speakers. The poem began with the following words:

I offer to myself the world in a phantasmagorical 

Effort of critical transformation

What is it?

It is the outcome of a mysterious delirium

That contracts my fingers

On the multicolored pastels

Which trace the words and the shapes

That burst on the paper like a retarded fusion

Of pachydermic frustrations

Of transcendental relationships

The ramifications degenerate themselves

The stories are no longer listened to

The tales are not anymore tackled

In a warm and re-comforting impetus

We do not listen we look at

We accept with infected eyes

Swollen by the resignation and the demission

The lyrical evocation of stories and tales that have become nearly obsolete suggests their healing powers could cure the “infected eyes,” the “resignation,” and the “demission.” Recited alongside the No to Torture paintings, the poem commits to restoring the sound muted first by Delacroix and then by the French army when it incarcerated and tortured Algerian women. The detention is addressed in the poem, which mentions “doorless and openingless” walls of rooms from which there is no escape. The call to listen resonates loudly in “Delirium,” as if asking viewers to focus on and try to hear the muted voices of the women in the paintings. 

During the opening of Forces of Change, Niati also sang three songs a capella in front of the No to Torture paintings (fig. 3). All three works were composed by the medieval singer, poet, oud and lute player Ziryab Ibn Nafi, who lived in exile in Muslim Andalusia and whose songs Niati discovered while working at the Algerian Ministry of Youth and Culture from 1969–76. For Niati, Ziryab Ibn Nafi epitomizes the experience of migration. Born in Baghdad, where he was the caliph Hārūn al-Rashīd’s singer, he was forced into exile by his musical master El Mossili, who was jealous of his student’s increased success and power. Upon his arrival in Andalusia, he revolutionized medieval music, became the court musician for caliph Abd ar-Rahmān II, and gained fame as “the poet of Cordoba.” Widely considered to be the progenitor of Andalusian musical cultures in all their forms, his rich poetic-musical compositions have significantly shaped contemporary urban music in North Africa. When the Arabs lost Andalusia to the Spaniards in the late 15th century, they escaped to North Africa, where they continued their musical traditions. Arab-Andalusian music, then, is a cultural expression that survived exile and displacement. For Niati, it forms an eternal memory of migration, which she herself experienced upon leaving Algeria in the 1970s. By singing these songs in front of No to Torture, she articulated her own experience as a migrant Algerian woman, creating a shared sonic, cultural space in which women of different generations can coexist across time and space.

As seen with No to Torture, Niati often mobilizes poetry and music to “speak back” to Orientalist artworks. She shares this concern of confronting Orientalist visual representations with artists such as Brooklyn-based Bianca Abdi-Boragi, who is currently working on a series of 16 paintings in response to Delacroix’s The Women of Algiers in Their Apartment,⁷ and with Algiers-based Maya Benchikh El Fegoun (El Meya), whose recent work reimagines two paintings of Algerian women by Étienne Dinet (French, 1861–1929).⁸ Niati’s use of sound, however, is distinctive within this context. Her installation To Bring Water from the Fountain Has Nothing Romantic About It from 1991, is composed of three large pastel-colored paintings and three pottery vases depicting floating women’s silhouettes, masks, fish, snakes, and the moon. The title refers both to Algerian folk songs that praise the beauty of a girl who fetches water from the fountain and to the abundance of Orientalist paintings incorporating sensual aesthetics to conceal the physical effort of carrying water. By using thick outlines for a woman’s silhouette in one of the paintings and displaying the paintings next to heavy pottery vases, Niati emphasizes the strain on women’s bodies. The poem that plays through speakers as part of this installation touches on a recurring theme in Niati’s work—the lack of freedom and inability to break free due to either colonial oppression or patriarchal social structures—by evoking a “World where the explosion of Revolution” was “blocked up by the walls built by possessive hands.” Addressing “oppressed spirits,” the persona in the poem evocatively says, “The immobility is the repressed dream of the impossible escape to far horizons.” The poem then introduces the figure of a “deformed Orientalist” who “has traveled desperately searching for peace and newness,” a reference to the many Orientalist artists in Algeria who depicted the land and its people as exotic and erotic. In the lines preceding the introduction of the Orientalist, the poem reads:

Not thinking is to burst out laughing

Like a bomb

Obscured by the night

By the incredible misadventure

Of limited freedom

No matter what the silence 

In the illuminated darkness [. . .]

Who are you Women who submit

To sensual passion

In the shadowy houses

With half-opened windows

Looking into interior courtyards

Women fatal and mysterious 

Powerful in their innocence 

Out of the ordinary

Out of time 

Unraveling the Orientalist depiction of Algerian women as mysterious, sensual, and erotic, the poem directly addresses the women fetching water, piercing the layers of Orientalist representation that have fixed a romanticized view of them. The display of To Bring Water from the Fountain Has Nothing Romantic About It also includes the shapes of human hands and feet formed of sand on the gallery floor, evoking the actual bodies of the women whom Orientalist art turned into static images, as well as multiple reproductions of the same photograph showing women fetching water, suggesting the recurring labor. 

Integrating sound into her multimedia installations, Niati works against both colonial and local archetypes of Algerian women by merging their abstract painterly depictions with poems or songs. It is not insignificant that Niati frequently recalls marveling as a child at the stories and fables told to her and her sisters by their grandmother and that she firmly attributes the development of her own plastic language to them (fig. 4).⁹ 
The women in her artworks are always heavily abstracted, as if their bodies are at risk of dissolving into smudges of paint or oil pastel. Yet sound makes their physical presence felt: The poems often address the women directly, while the Arab-Andalusian songs locate them within a distinct cultural heritage. These songs also allow Niati to explore her own position as a migrant Algerian woman for whom sound is a way of forging a precarious relationship with the women she depicts, across space and time. Niati’s expressive way of working and the fact that she never corrects the initial marks made on the canvas suggest that her paintings are deeply performative, as if refusing to be fixed as static images that would delineate the terms under which women can be pictured. Free-floating forms and overlapping colors create vibrant spaces in which the sounds of women’s voices slowly emerge.

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Jean-Michel Atlan (1913–1960)—who signed simply as Atlan in his works—¹is most often considered a representative of lyrical abstraction, an art movement that took root in Paris after World War II. Born in the Casbah of Constantine to a Jewish Berber family (a fact he often emphasized),² his Algerian childhood lent specific forms and colors to his uniquely creative imagination. Atlan’s parents combined tradition and modernity, enrolling their children in both a Talmudic school and a French secular school. Steeped in the mystic readings of sacred texts, his father transmitted knowledge of the Kabbalah to his son, a legacy that would remain important to the artist throughout his life.

In 1930, Atlan left home to study philosophy at the Sorbonne. He became involved in political circles as soon as he arrived in Paris, publishing in Trotskyist journals like La Vérité (The Truth) and attending anti-colonial protests. Concurrently, he began writing poetry, drawing closer to the literary circle surrounding Georges Bataille (1897–1962) and the revolutionary Surrealist movement. He started teaching philosophy but was dismissed when the Vichy regime began to collaborate with Nazi Germany and implemented anti-Jewish laws. Within this extremist context, in 1940, Atlan started to make visual art. Imprisoned under the pretext of “Communist activities,”³ then committed to the Sainte-Anne psychiatric hospital from January 1943 to August 1944, he executed his first paintings on boards and makeshift canvases provided by friends and hospital staff.⁴

Once Paris was liberated, Atlan dedicated himself entirely to painting, declaring: “I’ve made the leap from poetry to painting, like a dancer who has discovered that dance is better than verbal incantations for his self-expression.”⁵ He made his breakthrough in the art scene in December 1944, right after the war, at a time when artists had to reinvent themselves to rebuild their relationship with the public.⁶ Nonetheless, his career and distinctive work have posed a challenge to critics. Atlan was perceived both within the School of Paris and on its fringes, engaging in every pictorial trend—from “Art Informel” to lyrical abstraction—so as to better disassociate himself from all of them.⁷ 

After the war, Atlan was hailed as an innovator by new gallery owners such as Denise René and Aimé Maeght as well as by art critics and historians, including Jean Cassou, Charles Estienne, and Michel Ragon (who would become one of the artist’s closest friends). Like French writers Jean Paulhan, Jean Duvignaud, and Clara Malraux, American writer Gertrude Stein was among his first supporters, purchasing several of his works. As a philosopher, Atlan was comfortable taking stances on issues rocking the art world and in 1945, published a manifesto in the second issue of the French journal Continuity.⁸ In this text, he questioned the concept of reality, and, further, the conception of realism—which, according to him, resulted in paintings that were too literal.⁹ Atlan felt a profound sense of freedom and broke his contract with Galerie Maeght in 1947. After making that decision, which was praised by the French artist Pierre Soulages (1919–2022),¹⁰ Atlan experienced a slower period in his career. However, he continued to paint and exhibit. In 1957, his career gained momentum again with a mature body of work that received international recognition in Europe, Japan, and the United States. He would not attend the April 1960 opening of his solo exhibition at The Contemporaries Gallery in New York, because he died in Paris on February 12 in his studio on rue de la Grande Chaumière. By tracing the trajectory of his unconventional career, from his homeland to his premature passing, one can gain a deeper understanding of this self-taught artist’s distinctive impact on art, transcending predefined categories and movements.

A Gestural Painting Focused on the Sign

The works by Atlan in The Museum of Modern Art’s collection represent both periods of the artist’s activity (which were separated by a reclusive time of low visibility for Atlan from 1947 to 1957, although he was still working): lithographs and line blocks created by Atlan in 1945 for Description of a Struggle (Description d’un combat) by Franz Kafka, an illustrated book published in 1946, and Realm (Royaume), a pastel on colored paper made by the artist in 1957. Despite being created ten years apart, the sign is present in both works.¹¹ While the 1945 prints foreground the plastic potential of the sign, his later pastel establishes its use as a means for the artist to relate to the world around him. 

Atlan progressively developed images incorporating biomorphic forms and strange signs. What were his sources of inspiration? Perhaps Arabic calligraphy, which he had encountered in many forms, including in the epigraphic decors of mosques and Islamic monuments in Constantine, such as in the famous madrassa on rue Nationale by his parent’s house? Maybe Hebrew calligraphy, with its graphic and esoteric dimensions? Or Berber motifs used in the decorative arts and symbols to ward off evil? Indeed, Atlan recalled seeing “Berbers tracing geometric signs, making little triangles or zigzags on pottery.”¹² Or ideograms from Japanese culture, with which Atlan felt a close affinity? In Atlan’s visual world, everything is sign and can truly be grasped only through understanding a mysterious language all his own. Atlan constructed his work over a fifteen-year period under the reign of the sign, using lines that are sometimes sharp but more often supple and cursive—signs that, like language, have endless variations. Everything feels connected, both surprisingly open and yet equally mysterious: black forms emerge as abstract signs, or as stylized silhouettes of humans, birds, and trees, or a combination of all these morphing together in metamorphosis—a process central to the artist’s magical universe. Some of his works evoke the Maghreb,¹³ but the majority make no reference to it, leaving the viewer unconstrained in their visual experience and the enigma preserved.

Movement and gesture are embedded in his work. From his earliest ink drawings to his collection of pastels, Les Miroirs du Roi Salomon (King Solomon’s Mirrors), which was published posthumously, calligraphy proved to be consistently significant for the artist. In his illustrations for Kafka’s Description of a Struggle, Atlan transmuted this calligraphy into his own writing. As part of his first contract with Galerie Maeght, at the suggestion of Georges Le Breton and Clara Malraux (who translated Kafka’s text into French), Atlan created a series of lithographs to illustrate the edition for its September 1946 publication.¹⁴ Working with lithographer Fernand Mourlot proved vital to his work: “My contract with Maeght led me to Mourlot’s lithograph studio, where I worked with stones for a year. This time was incredibly enriching for my painting—the black and white taught me about color. In black-and-white work, I discovered light and matter.”¹⁵

He persistently pursued material investigation, driven by a desire to find the best way to bring his forms to life.¹⁶ He explained his choice of materials as follows: “I needed a medium like fresco or oil paint, which led to my absorbent preparations using sackcloth canvas and to mixing powders, oils, and pastels.”¹⁷ Just as a line cuts across to create a symbol, the direct application of pastels—which cannot be covered or redone—contributes to the expressivity of his gestural painting. Atlan’s large oil canvases from this period owe their sumptuous nature in part to the work he was doing on paper at the same time, including in distemper and pastels. His research on color, such as silver, white and ivory black, as well as the absorbent abilities of his mediums, led to his becoming “a modest yet incredible craftsman,” as Michel Ragon put it.¹⁸ He dedicated himself to pastels when the technique was considered outdated and had become largely obsolete in contemporary art. But Atlan was not swayed by fashion, and he worked in that medium (among others) because of its mineral aspects, which evoked earth colors and the ocher of rock. This was undoubtedly inspired by memories, such as of the magnificent, towering plateau upon which Constantine is built.

Conjuring a mental image of his home city, by then far away, he said of the sketches he made in his notebook, “I have Judeo-Berber origins, like almost everyone there in the old city . . . which was built with stone, gullies, eyries, and cactus.”¹⁹ With his propensity for these techniques, his soot-black lines, his symbols from another age, and his ocher colors, Atlan offered the viewer glimpses of the cultural substrate that inspired him and created a staunchly modern work that nonetheless maintained a firm grip on its cultural references. His friend, the artist and poet André Verdet (1913–2004), used these audacious words when speaking of Atlan: “This undercurrent of Afro-Mediterranean civilizations . . . Jean Atlan bathes in the very humus of eras archaic, beyond neolithic.”²⁰ Therewith related, it is noteworthy that from November 1957 to January 1958, the Musée des arts décoratifs in Paris was showing explorer Henri Lhote’s exhibition on cave paintings discovered in Tassili n’Ajjer, Algeria—an exhibition that resonated with several modern artists. In the case of Atlan, the artist told Pierre Alechinsky (born 1927) that the cave metaphor ran through his work. He admitted that, according to him, art and beauty are to be found deep within it.²¹

While not discounting the primordial role of migration in sparking and intensifying memory, everything points to the fact that for Atlan, these recollections and legacies were more than fixed and inert backdrops; instead, he saw them as pliable material for an inventive imagination, freed by gesture to enter the work, reactivated endlessly in creations in which signs and colors combine to give profound coherence and constant renewal.

Atlan seemed to play with materials and mediums to construct his pictorial space: juxtapositions and superpositions reveal the intense vibrations of his colors. He used the expressive potential of vivid hues to their greatest effect, contrasting them with the black forms that structure and invigorate the space. Indeed, Clara Malraux remarked on how the colors and signs were in tension, bringing a rhythm to the heart of his works.²² In the same period, Atlan himself discussed rhythms in dance and painting as a symbol of life, such as in “Letter to Japanese Friends,” which he wrote shortly before his death.²³ In this text, he calls painting an “adventure that confronts man with the formidable forces within and outside of him: destiny and nature.” The rhythm, tension, and violent expressivity in his works add a tragic dimension that reflects his internal suffering and the impact of the conflicting worlds he had lived through. 

Realm (1957) is among the works he produced in his later period of intense creative activity and public exposure. As with other paintings and pastels from this time, the space has been refined, and the composition focuses on fewer, more majestic signs. The artist stages polysemantic forms that appear to be contemporary and personal interpretations of arabesque decoration. Likewise, the presence of rhythm is felt: The forms dance within the painted field, and the viewer can picture them continuing beyond the frame despite the black line that borders it. These shapes seem backlit in a mysterious procession, connected through an entanglement that evokes the idea of metamorphosis. Ocher, red, chalk white, and a few blue highlights lend a strange and uncertain luminosity contrasting with the foreground’s dark scrim. This tension between light and dark, line and color, is accentuated by the texture and shade of the paper, deliberately left exposed akin to the strokes of a pen.

Characterizing Atlan’s Works: Decentering the Gaze, Moving beyond Categories

The two works by Atlan in MoMA’s collection, along with others that are emblematic of his style, such as the large paintings he created from the mid-1950s until his death, reinforce the idea that his art cannot be confined within the artistic categories of Europe at that time. Although mainstream formal logic opposes figuration and abstraction, this binary thinking does not apply to Atlan’s paintings. Today, this fluidity would easily be accepted, but it was a source of debate in the postwar period.

The terms “lyrical abstraction” and “abstract expressionism,” more suited to postwar tastes, likewise did not satisfy the painter, as he did not embrace either one. Michel Ragon put forth the notion of “other figuration” to describe Atlan’s work after his early Art Informel period. In a discussion, Atlan told him that he preferred the term “other art,” suggesting that he didn’t want to be confined to a trend or to be boxed in stylistically.²⁴ For Ragon, this so-called otherness stemmed largely from the artist’s embeddedness in North African culture and history.

Ragon and other critics then began to use the term “barbarism”—often associated with the idea of rhythm—to characterize his art. This word, as well as “primitivism,” were used to describe Atlan’s output, but each has its own level of ambiguity: the former oversimplified his approach, while the latter decontextualized his original anchoring, placing it within a different cultural arena. Beginning in the 20th century, many European artists attempted to tackle the non-Western universe of signs, seeking to emphasize the notion of primitivism. This idea, embraced by artists such as those associated with CoBrA, including Asger Jorn (1914–1973) and Corneille (Guillaume van Beverloo; 1922–2010)—with whom Atlan exhibited in 1951—does not align with his intentions.²⁵ Similarly, among the practitioners of lyrical abstraction, his approach bore no similarities to that of Georges Mathieu (1921–2012), for example, who was becoming famous in Paris around the same time for extolling a type of gestural painting inspired by the calligraphic arts of the Far East. Without a doubt, the postwar context was a suitable one in which to challenge the supremacy of European art. Still, unlike European artists, who were decentralizing their views to understand the world better, Atlan’s evolution was in colonized Algeria, where he had constructed his visual universe; furthermore, he could speak from within the subjugated societies resisting that domination in their own ways. He was not coming from the outside; he was no stranger to the universe of forms other artists would appropriate and use. He claimed to belong within it, first through his political engagement during his youth and then solely through his aesthetic after the war.

In this decentring of the gaze, the question arises whether Atlan’s works relate in form to the Algerian painters who were also in Paris during the 1950s. Those from the generation born in the 1930s took an interest in Atlan’s work upon arriving in Paris. Among the Maghreb painters in the modern era, there is formal proximity with the so-called painters of the sign (“les peintres du signe”), such as Moroccan artist Ahmed Cherkaoui (1934–1967) and Algerian artists Mohammed Khadda (1930–1991), Choukri Mesli (1931–2017), and Abdallah Benanteur (1931–2017), for whom Atlan was a predecessor. The concept of sign painting, coined by Algerian poet Jean Sénac (1926–1973), was an important aesthetic trend amid Algeria’s decolonization and post-independence period. It was historically aligned with a desire for cultural reappropriation through the spotlighting of Arabic and Berber writing, as well as ancestral geometric signs like those used for basket-weaving, pottery, rug-making, and tattoos.²⁶ In his essay “Elements for New Art,” Khadda stated: “Atlan, the prematurely deceased Constantinian, is a pioneer of modern Algerian painting.”²⁷ We should not interpret this statement as assigning a label or identity but rather as expressing both interest in a new aesthetic and gratitude for Atlan’s work—Atlan paved the way for those artists in that moment in history and helped to legitimize their artistic research. 

The Postcolonial Context: Atlan (and Us)

Once idolized, then overshadowed, Atlan is particularly interesting in the postcolonial context: it is necessary to rediscover the vivid work of this precursor, one who used the power of the sign to claim his place in the world at the beginning of decolonization and who underscored the presence of plural modernities within modern art. Critics in his time spoke of the syncretism of his work. By instead referring to the work of Édouard Glissant on creolization, we can go beyond this syncretic vision and reconnect Atlan’s work to other aesthetic experiences that are the result of the creolization of art in the 20th century, a significant source of renewal and a shared universe, recognizing the contributions of each of these actors without having to resort to the idea of hierarchy or centralization.

Translated from the French by Allison M. Charette and Beya Othmani. Click here to read the French version.

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Jean-Michel Atlan (1913-1960) – qui signait simplement Atlan –¹ est le plus souvent considéré comme l’un des représentants de l’abstraction lyrique, mouvement qui marqua la scène parisienne dans l’après-guerre. Né dans la casbah de Constantine, au sein d’une famille juive berbère, comme il aimait à le rappeler,² son enfance algérienne a contribué à donner formes et couleurs à son imaginaire singulier de peintre. Les parents d’Atlan concilient tradition et modernité, inscrivent leurs enfants à l’école talmudique mais également à l’école laïque française. Imprégné de la lecture mystique des textes sacrés, son père lui transmet aussi la connaissance de la kabbale, sujet qui accompagnera l’artiste tout au long de sa vie. 

En 1930, Atlan part étudier la philosophie à la Sorbonne. Dès son arrivée à Paris, il marque son engagement politique en publiant dans des revues trotskistes comme La Vérité et en participant à des manifestations anticolonialistes. En parallèle, il poursuit une activité de poète qui le rapproche du cercle littéraire formé autour de Georges Bataille ainsi que du mouvement surréaliste révolutionnaire. Il enseigne la philosophie, mais il est révoqué suite aux lois antijuives instaurées par le régime de Vichy qui collabore avec l’Allemagne nazie. C’est dans ce contexte extrême qu’Atlan commence le dessin dès 1940. Emprisonné sous prétexte de « menées communistes »,³  puis interné à l’hôpital psychiatrique Sainte-Anne de janvier 1943 à août 1944, il réalise ses premières peintures sur des matériaux de fortune grâce à la complicité de ses proches et du personnel soignant.⁴ 

Au moment de la libération de Paris, Atlan décide de se consacrer pleinement à la peinture et déclare : « Je suis passé de la poésie à la peinture comme un danseur qui découvrirait que la danse le révèle mieux que les incantations verbales ».⁵ Il émerge sur la scène artistique dès décembre 1944 dans un immédiat après-guerre qui pousse les artistes à chercher un nouveau langage pour renouer avec le public.⁶ Le parcours et les travaux de cet artiste singulier interrogent les critiques. Atlan se situe à la fois dans et en marge de l’école de Paris dont il traverse les tendances picturales, de « l’informel » à l’abstraction lyrique, pour mieux s’en extraire.⁷

Après-guerre, de nouveaux galeristes comme Denise René, Aimé Maeght, de même que certains critiques et historiens de l’art comme Jean Cassou, Charles Estienne ou encore Michel Ragon, qui sera un ami proche, voient en Atlan un novateur. À l’instar des écrivains comme Jean Paulhan, Jean Duvignaud, Clara Malraux, l’Américaine Gertrude Stein installée à Paris compte parmi ses premiers soutiens en lui achetant plusieurs œuvres. Théoricien, Atlan prend position avec aisance sur les questions qui agitent le monde de l’art et publie un manifeste dans le numéro 2 de la revue Continuity en 1945 par lequel il remet en cause le concept de réalité et par là même la conception du réalisme qui produit, selon lui, une peinture par trop littérale.⁸Profondément libre, Atlan rompt son contrat avec la galerie Maeght dès 1947. Survivant tant bien que mal à une période difficile à la suite de cette prise de position saluée à l’époque par Pierre Soulages,⁹ Atlan continue de peindre et d’exposer, puis revient en 1957 avec un travail confirmé qui trouve alors un écho international en Europe, au Japon et aux États-Unis. Il ne verra pas l’ouverture de l’exposition que lui consacre The Contemporaries Gallery à New-York en avril 1960, car il décède prématurément des suites d’une longue maladie, le 12 février, dans son atelier, rue de la Grande Chaumière à Paris. Suivre son parcours atypique et complexe, du pays natal jusqu’à son décès précoce, est une manière de rendre à cet artiste autodidacte, et à son art, toute leur singularité, et de sortir des catégories englobantes.

Une peinture gestuelle qui privilégie le signe 

Ainsi, les deux œuvres présentes dans le fonds du MoMA sont-elles représentatives de chacune de ces deux périodes, séparées par une éclipse au cours de laquelle Atlan est peu visible même s’il continue à travailler : lithographies de ses débuts, créées en 1945 pour illustrer la publication Description d’un combat de Franz Kafka, et Royaume, un pastel de 1957, réalisé après le tournant du milieu des années 1950. Dans les deux œuvres, distantes pourtant de plus de 10 ans, le signe est là, avec l’intuition précoce de son potentiel plastique dès 1945, puis avec une place affirmée comme marque d’une présence au monde. 

En effet, Atlan développe progressivement des peintures dont les formes sont chargées de biomorphisme et de signes étranges. Quelles sont ses sources d’inspiration ? La calligraphie arabe, qui lui fut familière, entre autres, sous sa forme épigraphique, ornant les monuments musulmans de Constantine, les mosquées ou la célèbre médersa proche de la maison de ses parents rue Nationale ? La calligraphie hébraïque, avec ses dimensions graphiques et ésotériques ? Les motifs berbères, à la fois décor ancestral et symboles prophylactiques ? Atlan évoquait lui-même qu’il avait vu des « Berbères tracer des signes géométriques, faire de petits triangles, des zigzags sur des poteries».¹⁰ Les idéogrammes de la langue japonaise, culture avec laquelle Atlan avait des affinités intimes ? Dans le monde peint d’Atlan, tout est signe et ne se laisse saisir qu’au travers d’une langue mystérieuse qui est, somme toute, sa propre empreinte sur le réel. Sur une quinzaine d’années, Atlan construit son œuvre en affirmant, par des lignes parfois acérées, mais le plus souvent souples et cursives, le règne du signe, porteur, comme un langage, d’infinies variations. Tout semble lié, étonnamment ouvert et mystérieux à la fois ; les formes noires apparaissent comme des signes relevant de l’abstraction, mais pourraient tout aussi bien être la stylisation de silhouettes humaines, d’oiseaux, d’arbres ou de tous ces éléments confondus dans une métamorphose qui semble l’une des clés de l’univers magique de l’artiste. De nombreux titres de ses réalisations évoquent le Maghreb,¹¹ mais la majorité n’y fait pas référence, laissant le récepteur libre et l’énigme préservée.

La question du mouvement et du geste va donc être centrale dans son œuvre. Depuis ses premiers dessins à l’encre de Chine jusqu’au recueil illustré de ses pastels, Les Miroirs du Roi Salomon, qui paraît à titre posthume, la calligraphie se révèle une écriture particulièrement importante pour l’artiste tout au long de sa carrière. Les illustrations de l’ouvrage Description d’un combat de Franz Kafka conservées par le MoMA constituent un exemple de la transmutation de cette calligraphie vers la propre écriture de l’artiste. Dans le cadre de son premier contrat avec la galerie Maeght, et sur une suggestion de Georges Le Breton et de Clara Malraux qui traduit le texte de Kafka,¹² Atlan va concevoir une série de lithographies pour illustrer cette édition d’art qui sera publiée en septembre 1946. Il va trouver chez le lithographe Fernand Mourlot un enseignement capital pour son œuvre : « Mon contrat chez Maeght m’a conduit vers les ateliers du lithographe Mourlot, où j’ai travaillé pendant un an sur les pierres. Ce séjour m’a terriblement enrichi sur le plan de la peinture elle-même ; le noir et le blanc m’ont appris la couleur. Dans le travail du noir et du blanc, j’ai fait la découverte de la lumière et de la matière ».¹³ 

Il poursuit obstinément ses recherches matiéristes, motivé par l’impératif du type de rendu qui pourra le mieux faire vivre ses formes.¹⁴ Il expliquait ainsi le choix des matériaux utilisés dans ses œuvres : « […] j’ai besoin d’une matière proche de la fresque et de l’huile à la fois, d’où mes préparations absorbantes, l’utilisation de grosse toile de sac, le mélange de poudres, d’huiles, de pastels. »¹⁵ De même que le trait incisif créant le signe, l’application directe du pastel sur lequel on ne peut revenir contribue à l’expressivité de sa peinture gestuelle. Les huiles sur toile de grand format qui datent de ce moment doivent pour une part leur somptuosité au travail sur papier que mène en parallèle Atlan au moyen d’autres techniques qu’il affectionne, telles que la détrempe et le pastel. Ses recherches sur les couleurs, comme le blanc d’argent ou le noir d’ivoire, ainsi que sur le pouvoir absorbant des supports, concourent à faire de lui un simple mais fabuleux artisan, selon Michel Ragon.¹⁶ Il s’adonne ainsi au pastel à une époque où la technique, considérée comme datée, est largement tombée en désuétude dans l’art contemporain. Mais Atlan n’est pas sensible aux phénomènes de mode et travaille ce médium, entre autres, pour son aspect minéral qui évoque les couleurs de la terre et les ocres des rochers. Ceci fait sans doute écho à ses souvenirs, comme le fantastique rocher surplombant des à-pics vertigineux sur lequel est bâtie Constantine : « […] mes origines sont judéo-berbères, comme un peu tout le monde là-bas dans cette vieille ville […] qui est construite avec des rochers, des ravins, des nids d’aigle et des cactus »,¹⁷ dit-il pour évoquer la présence mentale de sa ville natale, désormais lointaine, dont il dessine le profil dans ses carnets.

Par le goût pour ces techniques, par ses traits charbonneux, ses signes hérités d’un autre âge et ses teintes ocre, Atlan laisse entrevoir quel substrat culturel l’inspire pour créer une œuvre résolument moderne, mais en prise avec ses référents culturels. Son ami l’artiste et poète André Verdet parle d’Atlan en ces termes audacieux : « Ce souterrain des civilisations afro-méditerranéennes […]  Jean Atlan baigne à même l’humus des âges archaïques, par-delà le néolithique. »¹⁸ Rappelons qu’eut lieu à Paris au musée des Arts décoratifs, de novembre 1957 à janvier 1958 l’exposition d’Henri Lhote sur les découvertes de l’art rupestre en Algérie, dans le Tassili N’Ajjer, exposition qui interpella nombre d’artistes modernes. Évoquons également ici la métaphore de la grotte – qu’Atlan livre un jour à Pierre Alechinsky –,¹⁹ au fond de laquelle se trouvent, selon le peintre, l’art et la beauté. 

Sans oublier le rôle primordial de la migration qui potentialise et magnifie les souvenirs, tout concourt à penser que ces souvenirs et héritages ne sont pas pour Atlan de simples arrière-plans fixes et inertes, mais que ces perceptions passées sont les matériaux ductiles d’une imagination inventive que le geste libère pour les faire advenir dans le présent de l’œuvre, sans cesse réactivées dans des créations où signes et couleurs se combinent et donnent à l’œuvre peinte d’Atlan sa profonde cohérence et son constant renouvellement.

Atlan semble jouer avec les matières, le support, pour construire son espace pictural ; juxtapositions, superpositions révèlent les intenses vibrations de ses couleurs. Il exploite au mieux le potentiel expressif de teintes fortes contrastant avec ses formes noires qui structurent l’espace et le dynamisent. Clara Malraux remarquait dans l’un de ses textes que couleurs et signes étaient en tension, mettant la notion de rythme au cœur des œuvres.²⁰ Atlan lui-même, à la même période, parle du rythme dans la danse ou la peinture comme symbole de la vie, comme il le réaffirme peu avant sa mort dans sa « Lettre aux amis japonais ».²¹ Dans cette lettre, comme dans d’autres textes, il parle de la peinture comme d’une « aventure qui met l’homme aux prises avec les forces redoutables qui sont en lui et hors de lui, le destin, la nature ». Rythme, tension, violente expressivité donnent à ses œuvres – qui apparaissent comme des champs de forces antagoniques – une dimension tragique, échos de ses tourments intérieurs et des mondes que le peintre a traversés et qui l’ont profondément marqué par leur conflictualité même.

Le pastel conservé par le MoMA, Royaume (1957), fait partie des œuvres réalisées dans cette période d’intense activité de création et d’expositions en France et à l’international. Comme dans les autres toiles et pastels de cette dernière période, l’espace s’est épuré, la composition se concentre sur quelques signes à la présence majestueuse, qui emplissent le champ peint de manière expressive. Des formes polysémiques se déploient telles des déclinaisons modernes et très personnelles de l’antique arabesque. L’idée de rythme opère, les formes sont dansantes, et on les imagine se poursuivant aussi hors champ, malgré le trait noir qui délimite la scène. Ces formes paraissent vues comme à contre-jour dans une mystérieuse procession, reliées les unes aux autres dans un entremêlement qui évoque l’idée de métamorphose. Les ocres, les rouges, le blanc crayeux, quelques éclaircies de bleu apportent une luminosité étrange et incertaine qui contraste avec les formes au premier plan. Cette tension entre le clair et l’obscur, la ligne et la couleur est servie par le grain et la teinte du papier que le peintre laisse apparaître comme s’il participait à son écriture. 

Caractériser son œuvre ? Décentrer le regard, s’extraire des catégories

Ces deux œuvres et d’autres devenues emblématiques de son style, comme les grands formats qu’il réalise du milieu des années 1950 jusqu’à sa mort, confirment le sentiment que les catégories de l’art européen ne conviennent pas : si la logique formelle et l’usage opposent la figuration à l’abstraction, pour la peinture d’Atlan, ce schéma de pensée binaire ne s’applique pas. Cela est aujourd’hui accepté, mais était, après-guerre, l’objet de débats esthétiques et polémiques. 

Les vocables d’abstraction lyrique, d’expressionnisme abstrait, plus conformes à l’évolution des sensibilités d’après-guerre, ne semblent pas non plus satisfaire le peintre qui ne s’y reconnaît pas entièrement. Michel Ragon avait avancé la notion d’une « autre figuration », pour les œuvres d’après la première période informelle. Dans un dialogue, Atlan lui répond qu’il préfère le terme « art autre », pour montrer qu’il ne veut être enfermé dans aucun courant.²² Pour Ragon, cette altérité tient beaucoup au rôle matriciel joué par son histoire et sa culture nord-africaine. 

Michel Ragon ainsi que d’autres critiques utilisent alors l’adjectif « barbare », souvent associé à l’idée de rythme, pour caractériser son art. Ce terme et celui de « primitivisme », qui fut aussi mobilisé pour parler d’Atlan, ont leur part d’ambiguïté : le premier, pour essentialiser sa démarche, le second, pour décontextualiser son ancrage originel dans une aire culturelle autre. En effet, depuis le début du xx^e siècle, nombre d’artistes européens ont cherché à se confronter aux univers des formes non occidentales, ce que cherche à mettre en évidence la notion de primitivisme. Cette notion, utilisée par exemple pour les artistes du groupe CoBrA, tels Asger Jorn ou Corneille, avec qui Atlan a exposé en 1951 sans faire partie du groupe, ne semble pas convenir à son propos.²³ De même, parmi les tenants de l’abstraction lyrique, sa démarche n’est pas similaire à celle d’un Georges Mathieu qui devint célèbre à Paris au même moment en prônant une peinture gestuelle qui s’inspirait des arts calligraphiques d’Extrême-Orient. Certes, le contexte qui suit la Seconde Guerre mondiale est propice à remettre en cause la suprématie de l’art européen, mais contrairement aux artistes européens qui ont décentré leur regard pour mieux saisir le monde, Atlan a évolué dans l’Algérie colonisée, il y a construit son imaginaire et il parle de l’intérieur de ces sociétés assujetties qui résistent à leur manière à cette domination. Il ne vient pas de l’extérieur, il n’est pas étranger à l’univers des formes que d’autres vont utiliser et s’approprier. Il y affirme son inscription, d’abord, par son engagement politique durant ses années de jeunesse, et après-guerre, uniquement par son esthétique.

En décentrant le regard, se pose la question de savoir si les œuvres d’Atlan ont une proximité formelle avec celles des peintres algériens présents à Paris dans ces années 1950. Les peintres avec qui le rapprochement prend tout son sens sont issus de la génération née dans les années 1930. Et l’intérêt qu’ils ont porté dès leur arrivée à Paris au travail d’Atlan est déjà un indice. Parmi les peintres maghrébins de l’époque moderne, la proximité formelle se situe avec la mouvance des peintres du signe, comme le Marocain Ahmed Cherkaoui, les Algériens Mohammed Khadda, Choukri Mesli, Abdallah Benanteur, pour qui Atlan est un précurseur. Selon la notion forgée au début de l’indépendance par le poète algérien Jean Sénac, cet important courant esthétique, en mettant en avant l’écriture arabe et berbère ainsi que les signes géométriques ancestraux comme ceux utilisés pour la vannerie, la poterie, les tapis, le tatouage,²⁴ s’est inscrit historiquement dans une volonté de réappropriation au moment de la décolonisation et après les indépendances. Le peintre Khadda affirme dans son essai Éléments pour un art nouveau : « Atlan, le Constantinois prématurément disparu, est un pionnier de la peinture algérienne moderne. »²⁵ Il ne faut pas voir là l’assignation à une identité, mais plutôt l’intérêt pour une nouvelle esthétique et la reconnaissance du travail d’Atlan, qui, à ce moment de l’histoire, leur a ouvert voie et a contribué à légitimer leurs propres recherches.

Atlan et nous dans le contexte postcolonial 

Adulé puis éclipsé, Atlan revêt un intérêt tout particulier dans contexte postcolonial : nécessité de redécouvrir l’œuvre intense d’un précurseur qui affirme par le règne du signe, au début de la décolonisation, une présence au monde qui peut être saisie, en termes de modernités plurielles, comme l’un des rameaux de l’art moderne. Les critiques ont parlé en leur temps du syncrétisme de son œuvre. En se référant aux travaux d’Édouard Glissant, on peut aller au-delà de cette vision syncrétique et rapprocher cette œuvre d’autres expériences esthétiques qui sont le fruit d’une créolisation de l’art du xx^e siècle, source majeure de renouvellement et d’un universel partagé, en reconnaissant l’apport de tous ses acteurs sans recourir à l’idée de hiérarchie ou de centralité.

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Malika Agueznay, among the first woman modernist abstract artists in Morocco, was able to forge a space for herself within a predominately masculine environment by insisting on the presence of a gendered expression of modernity through her research into seaweed. She was a student at the École des Beaux-Arts of Casablanca from 1966 to 1970, during the tenure of the faculty associated with the experimental Casablanca School. While she was supported by her professors, as one of few women within the student body, Agueznay was able to create a new perspective arising from the embodiment of her own femininity.¹ Her work and viewpoints were shaped by the formative experience within the school, although she also distinguished herself in the ways in which her research emphasized her female identity. Agueznay was the only major female modernist artist linked to the École des Beaux-Arts at the time it was central to the debates around modernism in Morocco. Starting during her studies and expanding throughout her career, Agueznay elaborated on seaweed as a primary motif in her abstract practice. Drawing upon the influences of the Casablanca School, she engaged in abstraction that was deliberately evocative of femininity and of her own female perspective.

The École des Beaux-Arts was the locus of the Casablanca School, and Agueznay’s time as a student there coincided precisely with the movement’s brief heyday.² Directed by modernist artist Farid Belkahia (1934–2014) from 1964 to 1972, the institution became a critical space for modernist experimentation and practice. It had been founded in 1950 under the French protectorate, and its faculty in the 1960s and early 1970s, which included Mohamed Melehi (1936–2020) and Mohammed Chebaa (1935–2013), actively rejected the remnants of colonialism, including Eurocentric teaching methods. Instead, as part of their broader anti-colonial politics, the school’s professors rooted their pedagogy in local visual culture, using objects such as rugs and metalwork as models in the classroom and leading students on field trips around Morocco to document and study applied abstraction within mosques and other local spaces. The École des Beaux-Arts remains open in Casablanca and has trained many women artists since Agueznay. Though there were women on the faculty when the institution was integral to the development of Moroccan modernism, including influential art historian Toni Maraini (born 1941), many of the female students did not go on to have significant careers in the arts. Agueznay is the only major woman artist linked to the institution during this pivotal time.

One of the key moments in the history of the Casablanca School is the 1969 manifesto exhibition Présence plastique, which was held in Jemaa el-Fna in Marrakech. In protest to an official salon organized by the city’s ministry of culture, six male faculty members displayed their work in this public square over ten days to engage a broader audience in the debates around modernism.³ Agueznay and her classmates accompanied their professors to Marrakech, witnessing and participating in their conversations with the public. The Casablanca School artists followed up this exhibition later that same year with another public exhibition, this one in Casablanca in the Place du 16 Novembre. Similar to the presentation in Marrakech, their goal was to reach a broader audience by bringing art to a more public setting and to encourage conversation about it. Unlike in Marrakech, however, their students, including Agueznay, participated—though they did not stay with their work, because, as Agueznay remembers, they had to return class. Including the students in this undertaking was part of the broader system of collaboration that the faculty tried to promote. According to Agueznay, the relationship with her teachers “was very friendly. It wasn’t the teacher where you had to stand at attention, let him pass. Not at all—it was contestation. When we didn’t understand, they would help us understand. We discussed things. Once or twice a week, we would have round tables, where each artist would go with his students, and we would sit and talk. There were permanent discussions.” This sense of being part of an ongoing collaborative intellectual pursuit informed Agueznay’s interest in collective practice and abstraction. In 1978, alongside her former professors, she was a founding participant in the first edition of what would become the annual Cultural Moussem of Asilah. In 1981, with many of the same people, she was involved in a public art project within the Berrechid psychiatric hospital, where in collaboration with one of the patients, she produced a ten-meter-long mural. In 1985, she created a large-scale mural in Asilah as part of the festival. These collaborative forms of public engagement were influenced by the formative ideas of the Casablanca School.

Agueznay entered the École des Beaux-Arts at age twenty-four. She was slightly older than her fellow classmates and already a mother, which further set her apart. Although there were very few women students—only three in her memory within the painting studio when she began—she felt supported by the faculty and other students, and was not only treated kindly and respectfully but also no differently. When pressed, Agueznay described some backlash once she had left the school and begun to maintain, as a woman artist, a modernist abstract practice. (“En tout cas, j’ai reçu des coups de bâton pour ça!”⁴) While still a student, she insisted on creating a place for herself as a mother and artist, bringing her young child, Amina, with her on days she did not have childcare. As the institution was relatively small, Amina was able to sit in the corner, where she would play with clay provided by one of the professors. Agueznay remembers Belkahia raising his eyebrows at Amina’s presence each Wednesday, but Agueznay insisted that she could either come with her child or not come at all. She had a second baby while still a student, and so then both children accompanied her on field trips; she, in fact, attended Présence plastique with her newborn. Similarly, her children always joined her in Asilah, as they would be on school vacation during that time. Agueznay describes the collective effort of the festival, with the participation of whole families. Children would have drawing lessons or take part in artist-led workshops. When pressed about the challenges of balancing her practice and her role as primary caregiver, she deflected: “It was the only solution. . . . It was like when the artists got to the school, the most essential thing was art and research. . . . We all [the whole family] participated in the creation of the festival.” Agueznay created a space for herself as a mother and artist at a time when the possibility of maintaining both identities was a crucial aspect of the second wave feminist investigation. In her “Manifesto for Maintenance Art” (1969), for example, Mierle Laderman Ukeles (born 1939), specifically argues against the patriarchal American art system that deemed she could not be both a mother and an artist, and embodied that in different “maintenance” works. Similarly, in 1973, the collective Mother Art created a playground for the Feminist Studio Workshop in Los Angeles, making their children’s inclusion in art spaces part of their work. The presence of Agueznay’s children was not performative, but rather the result of necessity. She created this space for herself, though, at a time when there were no other female modernist artists in Morocco and when, in other parts of the world, artists were actively confronting what seemed to be a double bind.  

Agueznay’s practice can be seen structurally through the lens of feminist analysis, including in the groundbreaking way that she navigated her career as an artist and her role as a mother. Within the work itself, which consistently features the motif of seaweed, she also elaborated what she considered to be a specifically female form of abstraction. Recalling, perhaps, the marine plants and algae she would find as a child in summers on the coast, the motif in practice is not figurative. Far from being determined by mathematical systems, these organic shapes are formed instead by instinct, then further built up by the inclusion of texture, whether through cut wood, thickly applied ink, or sand within the paint. The abstraction thereby becomes rooted in the body, guided by feelings and the senses. Agueznay has linked the seaweed to the female form, and saw the rounded shapes, when she first developed them, as only possible from a female artist. Unlike the hard edges of the geometrical abstractions produced by other students, these rounded twisting shapes were, for her, rooted in her own female identity. Within an overwhelmingly masculine context, both at the École des Beaux-Arts and within the broader art scene in Morocco, Agueznay’s deliberate evocation of female identity and female form can be read as a concrete claim for female presence in what was a male-dominated field.

Over time, Agueznay has incorporated the seaweed form in different ways, in effect, pulling it in different directions: as pure abstraction, as the foundation for calligraphic text, as part of a distinct plant formation, or as a specific evocation of the female body. She has also used it across mediums, placing it at the center of her multifaceted practice, which has extended from printmaking and painting to sculpture and woodwork. She first used the motif in the monumental group of painted wooden panels she showed at the 1968 student exhibition. The six panels together measure 305 by 440 centimeters (approximately 10 by 14 1/2 feet), much larger than human scale. In the center of the grouping, there are two diamonds stacked vertically, the smaller one on top of the larger one. They connect organically, with the same seaweed contracting at the meeting point and continuing to expand into the lower shape. The background is sky blue, with the central diamonds in bright orange and the remaining seaweed a deeper marine blue. The whole work is covered in seaweed, and the central shape is thereby distinguished through the use of color; while there are distinct diamonds, there are no hard edges delineating them. The diamonds evoke the curves of a woman’s body. In its use of a singular sign that dominates the panels, the project seems equally influenced by imagery culled from rugs or jewelry. Indeed, the faculty insisted that students undertake rigorous research into forms rooted in local visual culture. The seaweed began from a formal interest. Struggling to find a theme for her final project, Agueznay was encouraged by Melehi to “do your lines,” and it was through visual experimentation that she settled on seaweed. Melehi himself, over the course of a career lasting almost sixty years, maintained a central interest in the motif of the wave, which he then used in various configurations and toward different ends. In the repetition over the span of her career of a central abstract motif, and in some ways the shared oceanic theme, Agueznay is clearly linked to Melehi, who encouraged her to stay with this project. However, there are obvious distinctions within their artistic endeavors. Melehi’s hard-edge waves are often in dialogue with science and cybernetics, and his abstractions seem to function as precise systems separate from human intervention. In contrast to Melehi’s coolly analytic abstraction, the organic shape of Agueznay’s seaweed seems lawless, growing upon itself in a generative abstraction. Built up with materials that add dimension, either through mixed-media application or the inclusion of sand in the paint, Agueznay’s work is also tactile. Her individual touch is always present. Agueznay pulled motifs, forms, and topics from the Casablanca School, while at the same time, carving out her own formal path and insisting on a female presence within a broader, predominantly masculine landscape.

Many of these ideas have coalesced in the importance of printmaking in Agueznay’s practice. She began printmaking in the first edition of Asilah Moussem in the workshop of Roman Artymowski (1919–1993), and went on to study in New York in the workshops of Mohammad Omar Khalil (born 1936) and Robert Blackburn (1920–2003).⁵ She continued to explore printmaking in Asilah with Khalil, Blackburn, and Krishna Reddy (1925–2018), exhibiting her prints in group exhibitions there starting in 1979. She began leading this same workshop when Khalil left. Agueznay was the first woman printmaker in Morocco. Like in the rest of her practice, her prints primarily emphasize the seaweed motif and are built up to have different layers of texture. The physicality of the printmaking process has also been important to her, as she has strived to maintain her own touch and presence within this medium. Collaboration has likewise been central to this part of her practice, both in terms of her own education in different workshops and in the annual workshops she led in Asilah for over twenty years. More broadly, in becoming Morocco’s first woman printmaker and then incorporating printmaking as one part of her multidisciplinary practice, Agueznay has created a space for herself as an artist outside the boundaries of media and gender.

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As the entrepreneurial co-founder of the Société Zin, a modernist design company, Farhat contributed to the visual aesthetics of civic spaces during the formative period of Tunisian socialism and state feminism. In the 1960s and early 1970s, the artist created numerous murals and decorative programs to enhance the architectural environment of newly built schools, hotels, factories, banks, and government buildings. This essay introduces Farhat’s key role in sustaining a mural tradition among Tunisian modernists, and describes a selection of the artist’s monumental designs in which her characteristic hybrid creatures predominate. Crafted in ceramic tiles, paint, stone, iron, and wool, Farhat’s artistic corpus portrays animated scenes of laborers and artisans, geometric patterns associated with textiles and pottery made by women, nude female bathers, coastal motifs, and elements of industry. Hybrid organisms composed of flowers, birds, and artisanal symbols populate these fantastical environments. Many of the monumental works remain in situ across Tunisian civic spaces, serving as muted backdrops for the activities of students, teachers, tourists, laborers, and bureaucrats. What subdued histories might Farhat’s composite creatures, made up of anthropomorphized artisanal motifs associated with femininity, reveal? 

A nude woman bather floats along a current of stylized motifs, forming the focal point of a ceramic tile wall designed by artist Safia Farhat circa 1963. Decorating the reception area of the Hôtel Skanès Palace, located on the waterfront of the coastal resort area of Monastir-Skanès, the bather turns her oval eye toward passing guests and employees. The curvature of her breast and fingers mirrors the undulations of waves (fig. 1). She emerges from an imaginary seascape of floating elements: the rooftops of mosques, zigzags from carpets, triangular fish, flowering plants, and jewel-like biomorphic shapes. Two inset panels depicting gazelles and mythical composite creatures rest against the backdrop of deep blue and coral tiles. A few kilometers away, along the same beachfront, Farhat composed similar designs for the stone panels that decorate the bar in the restaurant of the Hôtel les Palmiers. Situated in a hotel adjacent to the presidential palace in the city of Monastir, the bar’s counter features two rows of geometric and biomorphic designs (fig. 2). Farhat’s evolving iconography may be characterized by such fantastical motifs drawn from women’s textiles, tattoos, jewelry, and ceramic wares. These designs germinate and sprout in Farhat’s decorative programs in Monastir’s secondary school and civic assembly hall, as well as in other sites across Tunisia. The artist’s composite creatures and artisanal motifs animate her compositions and reveal the entwining of gender, labor, and art during the 1960s.¹

Safia Farhat worked across several professional domains as she sought to breathe new life into art forms associated with women’s artisanal production.² She created these decorative programs in the post-independence environment of the late 1950s and early 1960s, when family law reform in 1956 enacted a regime of state feminism, while broader initiatives aimed at women’s social and economic development endorsed the transformative power of creating art.³ As larger numbers of women enrolled in secondary school and pursued higher education, in particular at the École des Beaux-Arts in Tunis, feminist narratives drew on the symbol of the woman artist to promote female creativity and independent thought, and to serve as a gauge for societal progress (figs. 3, 4).⁴ Moreover, the nationalist quest to establish a Tunisian modernist aesthetic gave momentum to the ennoblement of art forms subordinated as “handicraft” under the French protectorate. By the early 1960s, art forms such as weaving and ceramics came to represent possibilities for enhancing women’s social, economic, and intellectual autonomy.

A professor of decorative arts at the École des Beaux-Arts, Farhat joined Abdelaziz Gorgi (Tunisian, 1928–2008) to become the school’s second Tunisian instructor in 1959; Gorgi taught ceramics from 1956 onward (fig. 5). Both artists were also members of the École de Tunis, a group of Tunisian, French, and Italian painters who increasingly turned to craft-based mediums in their explorations of material and heritage. As professors, Farhat and Gorgi shaped a beaux-arts curriculum that sought to elevate art forms categorized diminutively in colonial discourses as feminized craft. They sought to instill in a new generation of Tunisian students creative, entrepreneurial approaches to the modernist reinvention of art forms connected to local patrimony, as well as the confidence to propose innovative designs executed using craft processes. Under Farhat’s leadership, students in the atelier of decoration gained new perspectives on reviving “artistic craft” through field trips to artisanal centers. She also partnered with the National Office of Handicraft, and specifically weavers in the textile ateliers, to teach technique and design. A feminized bureau whose workforce was 80 percent female, the National Office of Handicraft attracted thousands of young, unmarried women into its pilot training programs because “handicraft,” especially weaving, represented an acceptable profession for lower-class women who, past primary-school age, sought opportunities for education and employment. Farhat’s experimental pedagogy endeavored to support collaborations between artists and artisans, and to cultivate female relationships across social classes.⁵ As she undertook teaching and administrative responsibilities that integrated art and artisanal production, she simultaneously trained a new generation of women creators who would go on to bridge institutional divides.

In 1963, Farhat and Gorgi co-founded a design company, the Société Zin, that put their pedagogical approaches into praxis. This company took its name “Zin” from the Arabic word zīn, which denotes beauty, decoration, and the power to enthrall. Together, Farhat, Gorgi, and their collaborator Claude Béja designed and delegated orders for decorative programs that often overlapped with architectural commissions mandated by law. Specifically, the One Percent Law, reinstated in 1962 by presidential decree, required that a portion of every civic building’s budget be allocated to decoration.⁶ This law underscored president Habib Bourguiba’s emphasis on the arts as a product of societal and cultural advancement. It also enabled participating artists to capitalize on the so-called development decade as the government commissioned artworks for the building of dozens of centralized, state-run offices, the tourism and hotel industry, the redesign of Monastir (Bourguiba’s natal city), schools, and impermanent displays for trade fairs. New construction, concentrated in the capital and coastal regions, centered on tourist and bureaucratic infrastructures. Artists, frequently members of the École de Tunis and their artisan collaborators, were subcontracted to decorate civic buildings, producing more than a hundred murals, mosaics, obelisks, friezes, and tapestries in wood, ceramic, iron, glass, stone, and wool in the decade following the law’s reinstatement. A journalist with the newspaper La Presse elaborated the mission of the Société Zin: “Their goal, they tell us, is to attempt to renovate Tunisian decoration with a utilitarian intention in seeking to employ as many artisans as possible. We have an array of artist-artisans in Nabeul, Ksar Hellal, Kairouan, Hammamet, and elsewhere, such as ceramicists, stonecutters, nattiers [plant-fiber weavers], weavers.”“⁷ Commissions for decorative programs not only created the conditions under which artistic collaborations across social classes could occur, but also brought visibility to these relationships.

Due to its strategic importance in the Ten-Year Plan, which underpinned Tunisian socialism and the Bourguibist struggle against underdevelopment, tourism was an early and vital source of artistic patronage.⁸ The Tunisian Tourist Hotels Company (Société des Hôtels Tunisiens Touristiques, or SHTT) was a public corporation established in 1959 to build a tourist infrastructure. The Société Zin facilitated many decorative projects for SHTT hotels by providing clients with architectural plans and proposing designs for decorative programs. Depending on a project’s size, scale, and medium, Farhat and Gorgi hired collaborating artisans for its execution and employed iconographic references to dramatize the budding artisanat artistique (artistic craft industry). Hotels also purchased handmade objects such as rugs, ceramic vases and ashtrays, and wrought iron candelabras to complete the decor. The tourism industry promoted the concept of uplifting the artisan, stating in its bulletin, “In Tunisia as elsewhere, the craftsman must learn new skills to become both an able technician and creative artist. The 20th Century has assigned him a new and appropriate role: that of enriching daily life by beautifying useful and functional objects.”⁹

The blend of fantastical, animate elements and symbols of feminine labor, which characterizes Farhat’s ceramic tile wall in the Hôtel Skanès Palace, in fact threads her decorative commissions of the period. In partnership with Gorgi, Farhat designed the reception area of the Hôtel l’Oasis in Gabès and the restaurant-bar of the Hôtel les Palmiers in Monastir to be self-referential. Both seafront hotels feature ceramic tile murals, pierced ceramic walls, and sculpted stone decor that whimsically echo their particular decorative characteristics. Farhat’s stonework in the Hôtel l’Oasis, though now partially dismantled, includes fragments of geometric and vegetal motifs abstracted from women’s textile designs and tattoos. In one panel painted by an unknown renovator, a tattooed peasant woman holding a pomegranate wades through knee-deep water (fig. 6). Schools of fish bearing delicate geometric and floral patterns dart around her ankles; these oval creatures resemble the opaline shapes drifting through the bather’s seascape in the Hôtel Skanès Palace. Above, the fronds of a palm tree turn into resplendent jewelry-like patterns, accentuating the triangular fibula pinning the woman’s dress; similar fibulae spring to life in other compositions.

Other examples of hybrid artisanal creatures are visible in Farhat’s bar in the Hôtel les Palmiers, built by presidential architect Olivier-Clément Cacoub for the hotel adjoining Bourguiba’s summer palace (fig. 7); her stonework depicts animate fibulae and geometric and biomorphic designs similar to those in Gabès and Monastir-Skanès. Highly stylized triangular fish and aquatic creatures (like phytoplankton) swim and float across the bar’s frontispiece. These auspicious symbols re-create the orderly structure of a woven grid. Linear motifs, like small propellers, protrude from the triangles; the “arms” and “hands” of the central anthropomorphic design suggest feminine patterns and a bridal motif found in weaving (fig. 8). In addition, Farhat and Gorgi decorated both hotels with pierced, undulating ceramic walls in vivid orange and in pale turquoise and green. In the Hôtel les Palmiers, Gorgi’s luminescent screen of gazelles, horses, and birds morphing into flowers separates Farhat’s bar from the dining-lounge area and encircles the restaurant (fig. 9). The installation of these artworks in new spaces of economic and ideological power situated them in development discourses, especially, as Tunisian scholar and artist Aïcha Filali (born 1956) has articulated, during a period when hotels officially served as “windows into the country.”¹⁰ While tourism constituted one significant source of patronage for Farhat, she also created monumental works featuring hybrid creatures for state offices and factories.

Farhat’s stone monument L’homme et le travail (Man and Work), which she designed in 1964 for the entrance to the National Institute of Productivity in Radès, amalgamates motifs that exemplify their collective inscription in the institutions of economic and gender reform (figs. 10, 11). Sculpted in low relief by stonecutters from Dar Chaabane, this triangular post displays images on three sides. The composition on the first side depicts a stylized male figure in profile sniffing a mashmūm (bouquet of jasmine buds), which he grasps with pointed fingers. On the second side, a sturdy plant, rooted firmly in the ground, sends up curling leaves and a flower bud, which cups a fish. One bird, which stands atop the flower, is personified with flowing hair and a large, oval-shaped eye. An arched doorway frames these hybrid creatures. On the third side of the post, archetypal plants grow in three-dimensional layers above a cogwheel, a symbol of Bourguibism. Farhat’s iconography elicits the sociocultural and agricultural programs of the National Institute of Productivity, the developmental aims of which she interrogated through her own collaborations with artisans and art students.

Farhat installed friezes in iron and enamel on the facade of the central office of the Tunisian Sugar Company in Béja that invite powerful comparison to her realist mural inside the main entrance (figs. 12–14). The abstract imagery of the exterior friezes consists of stacked lines, zigzags, half-moons, and geometric shapes evoking the core elements and colors of an unraveled tapestry. The dynamic shapes and lines bend, suspending animated crescents and triangles resembling Farhat’s hybrid birds and angular fish. In the building’s interior, the artist painted a socialist realist–style mural depicting male workers holding tools (fig. 15). While at first glance the metallic iron compositions bear scant formal resemblance to the realist portrayal of heroic masculine workers, the thematic content of the murals and the forms and materials of the friezes bespeak the gendering of labor. Artisans and laborers occupied the same discursive fields related to societal advancement. Farhat drew regularly from the symbols, motifs, and materials associated with women weavers in probing the alignment of artistic and economic revivals, and she employed the labor and ingenuity of women artisans in her work. Her triangles, bouquets, and zigzags suggest those found in other women’s artistry, particularly textiles woven in Kairouan and regions of the southern interior, which were targeted by the National Office of Handicraft in its reorganization. Moreover, in official discourses, the laborer (epitomized by the woman weaver) represented the citizen deemed in need of social uplift. In the case of the Tunisian Sugar Company, an ironworker executed Farhat’s designs in a collaborative process between artist and artisan. In evoking the feminized artisanat, Farhat conjured the class-based, gendered division of labor inherent in the production process of the decorative commissions.

Textile motifs comprise the content of Farhat’s largest ceramic frieze, a culminating example of a decorative program in which diverse artistic genres and industries converge. Around 1964 Farhat and Gorgi received a commission from SOGICOT (Société Générale des Industries Cotonnières de Tunisie, or General Company of Tunisian Cotton Industries). At SOGICOT’s main factory in Bir Kassaâ, they merged artisanal and coastal themes for an audience of bureaucrats, designers, and textile workers. Farhat designed a vast ceramic tile mural to wrap around the exterior facade of the building, while Gorgi created a monumental stone obelisk to be set within a courtyard fountain. Farhat’s winding panels portray a mythical world in which feminine motifs are suspended in a watery blue seascape populated by human and animal figures and composite creatures made from anthropomorphized artisanal designs. Across the right wall facing the entrance, these designs interlace female figures, male figures in a boat, fish, flowers, and horses (fig. 16). The left wall bears some of these whimsical elements floating alongside hybrid artisanal creatures; landscapes composed of geometric elements evoking patterns of five (khumsāt), weavings, silver fibulae, and candlesticks (shamʿdan); and men’s bodies composed of geometric-patterned rugs (figs. 17, 18). Composite creatures made of flowers, birds, and textile motifs, patterned into a vivid blue, purple, and red garden, decorate the main entrance (fig. 19).  

Seen as a trailblazer in economic development, SOGICOT was a strong employer of wage-earning women in the 1960s and 1970s. Bourguibist discourses equated the burgeoning industrial textile industry with handicraft, and emphasized its capacity to cultivate an “uneducated” female workforce. As Sonia Maarouf wrote for Femme in 1965, “Yesterday, this woman, who was a custodian of a generation characterized by nomadism, managed to find stability, and today we see her contributing to the building of a new society based on social justice.”¹¹ Sixty-eight women designers, including Beaux-Arts graduates and factory workers alike, were to gain autonomy and professional experience in convergent textile industries perceived as intimately connected to women’s hands and bodies. Farhat’s portrayals of feminine artisanal production, animated by her composite creatures, are discursively linked to embodied labor, constituting an insightful visual record of the interface between fine art and craft in their evocation and materialization of gendered hierarchies of production. These linkages, in turn, delineate the works’ inscription in the infrastructure of gender reform and economic growth, and in an aesthetic of self-referentiality characteristic of the artist’s work of the period.

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The canon of Egyptian art history has consistently championed women. Unlike their Western contemporaries, Egyptian women artists have been both present and on an equal footing with their male counterparts since the first Salon du Caire was held in 1921. As a result, a local industry of empowered women painters emerged during the last century.¹ Exposed to the outside world, they defied conventions, pioneered art movements, fought for women’s rights, and in the process, spoke on behalf of a nation. Gazbia Sirry (born 1925) is one of these groundbreaking women.

A spokesperson for seventy years of history, Sirry might well be looked upon as a complex political project.² Notwithstanding the historical significance of her art—and the international recognition that has come with a record of seventy-five-plus one-woman shows across continents—Sirry is surprisingly under-studied, and her art is described predominantly in technical terms centered on “color.”³ The quintessence of life and political statements, however, seems to have been ignored, if not entirely missed. Educated in Egypt and Europe, Sirry built one of the most influential careers in twentieth-century modern Arab art.⁴ Divided into three overlapping phases, her paintings blur art and politics as they narrate the story of societies vacillating between triumph and defeat, dignity and humiliation, social justice and inequality. Sirry arguably birthed a new identity that makes no distinction between seeing and militancy. As she fluidly moved between styles, this “childless” grande dame became the national godmother to an entire nation (fig. 1).

Gazbia’s Voice: The Voice of a People

Much has been written about Gazbia Sirry’s “Lust for Color,” the title of the only monograph published about the artist, making “color” her legacy and the thread on which her entire career hangs.⁵ Although significant, color is but one facet of Sirry’s life and work. Since her appearance on the art scene in the late 1940s (fig. 2), she has opened a portal to Egyptian society in an effort to translate “the worries that plague [people].”⁶ Decidedly figurative, then abstract expressionistic, her work is often denied the sociopolitical adumbrations she intended when she began her career by stripping the veil of intimate moments in open-end narratives. Often described as “ornamentation”⁷ or “Decorative Realism,”⁸ her early stylistic phase is a window onto an infinitely expandable world—and the foundation of her entire journey.

Raised by her widowed mother and divorced grandmother, Sirry was determined to address gender equality at a time when heated debates around the “Woman Question” peaked.⁹ Filled with movement, resistance, and commotion, the extraordinary painting Tahrir al-Mara’a (Women’s Liberation; 1949) shows Sirry’s symbolism as she renounces the inherited traditions¹⁰ that hold women back (fig. 3).¹¹ Three nude figures struggle to pull an immobile camel forward while carrying three veiled women inside a carriage shaped as a pyramid—a reminder of the tombs of the dead in ancient Egypt. On the top right, a muscular man wrestles a large stone as he tries to free the women’s path. In the middle of what could be a forest, humans shaped as trees raise their hands as they seek salvation. In al-Zawjatan (The Two Wives; 1953), Sirry touches on the controversial topic of polygamy (fig. 4). At the center of this image, the new wife sits on the floor, looking straight at the viewer. In her arms, a newborn baby boy is latched to her breast. The “expired” wife sits miserably behind her replacement. Grieving, the latter’s two teenage daughters console her as they feel responsible for their mother’s misfortune. By the same token, Sirry digs deeper into the ramifications of gender preference as she stresses favoritism toward the male child (Um Antar; 1953; fig. 5), or the perks of daughterhood’s associated domestic lifestyle of seclusion (Um Ratiba; 1952; fig. 6). In this series of paintings, Sirry calls upon the sacred light of ancient Egyptian temples, the rich colors of Coptic textiles, and the geometric themes of Islamic art. Playing with light and darkness, she repeats and juxtaposes vibrant motifs and patterns on walls, floors, and clothes. Consistent with Nigerian curator Okwui Enwezor’s notion of “provincialized modernisms,”¹² Sirry transforms the scenes into modern folkloric mosaics in which spatial disharmony and random precision meet.

Unlike the majority of Sirry’s pattern-rich paintings of the 1950s, Umm Saber (1952; fig.  7), is composed of large monochromatic blocks. A tribute to one of the peasant women who sacrificed her life to resist British occupation in 1951 (fig. 8), the painting depicts a rural woman dressed in a traditional loose-fitting black gown (galabia).¹³ Staring out at the viewer, her eyes are filled with fear and she is leaning backward. On the right, three men attempt to hold her before she collapses, while on the left, a young boy, probably her son, raises his tiny arms as he seeks to grab his mother’s attention. In the background, a dozen small figures dressed in similar uniforms and holding rifles stand behind barbed wire. A two-dimensional solid ground separates the soldiers from Umm Saber. Evocative of ancient Egyptian painting, the main figures are characterized by an absence of linear perspective, which results in a seemingly flat and static scene. Darker than the woman, the three men and the boy are shown in profile, their eyes drawn from a frontal view to infuse the surrealistic elements with Sirry’s ancient past.

Whereas a simple village woman illustrates Sirry’s treatment of oppression under British colonialism, two emancipated upper-class urban women represent the dawn of a new era. A tribute to the Revolution of July 23, 1952, and the overthrow of the Egyptian monarchy, Song of the Revolution, also painted in 1952, depicts two fashionably dressed women with strikingly short hair, gazing at the unknown (fig. 9). Rendered in horizontal shades of red, white, green, and black, the women’s clothes blend the colors of the old royal and the new liberation flags to symbolize the rite of passage. One woman plays the piano while the other is standing. Portrayed with a falcon face reminiscent of Horus, the emblem of the revolution, the standing woman places her birdlike hand firmly on the illegible music note, bare except for the word “nashid” (chant or anthem).

The Rupture

By 1959, Sirry was working in a new ideological and stylistic zone—revealing her private sphere in times of political instability. Two works serve to illuminate this period: Fortune Teller (1959) marks the break between representational painting and the beginning of the abstract period (fig. 10).¹⁴ Whether by choice or destiny, Sirry never had children. Contextualized, she resorts to palmistry and folk culture to reflect on the future and the (im)probability of having a child. Meticulously constructed around the symbolism of colors developed in ancient Egypt, the face and belly of the central figure flaunt the blue color that routinely symbolizes fertility and rebirth.¹⁵ The diamond-shaped belly button hints at the amulets used to protect the pregnant. While the yellow/gold face stands for the eternal, the choice of a striking red body indicates life and victory, and anger and fire. Facing the viewer, the central figure displays swollen breasts, a rounded belly, and possibly an embryo, cradled by a pale hand. The Arabic title of the painting Kare’at al-Kaf translates as The Palm Reader, which helps to explain why Sirry has chosen to highlight the hand. Rather than reading a coffee cup, or looking into a crystal ball, the artist spells out the method used to predict the future while evoking the protective talisman known as the Hand of Fatima. Heads in profile, the couple surrounding the central figure follow the conventional rule in ancient Egyptian art whereby the male figure is depicted with reddish-brown skin and the woman, here only the body, is light-skinned. In this context, Sirry’s choice to depict the face of the left female figure in black can be associated with rebirth and resurrection, as was the case with the god Osiris, who was returned to life by Isis. “By contrast,” as interpreted by Tiffany Floyd for the exhibition Post-War: Art between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–1965, “the arms of the mud-red male figure on the right are crossed over his chest, a traditional burial pose, suggesting death.”¹⁶ Or the hopelessness of having a child. It is not clear who the central figure represents. Is it the palm reader or a self-portrait? Who is the naked couple? The artist and her husband? Highly rich in symbols and meanings, Fortune Teller is one of the artist’s most revelatory works as Sirry opens up a personal space and invites the viewer to partake in her own self-interrogation (fig. 11). Equally important, it stands at a crossroad between the desire to create a new life and the imprisonment of her husband, Adel Thabet, during the massive crackdown on leftist intellectuals by president Gamal Abdel Nasser (r. 1954–70).¹⁷

In al-Sign or Awlad al-Takhshiba (Prison or Prison Children; 1959), Sirry depicts six figures trapped in the same cell (fig. 12). The figure on the top left is crying, while the one on the right looks to the side, wearing a prisoner’s number on his chest. Using sketchy brushstrokes, Sirry has distorted the prisoners, connecting them through yellow outlines, twisted facial features, and oblique angles. As we sense a reduction of unnecessary visual clutter, the prisoners are portrayed as shadows, laying open the simplicity of the subjects and conveying their blank resignation. Rather than juxtaposing colorful Islamic or Coptic geometric motifs, Sirry’s treatment of imprisonment evokes Pharaonic friezes found in tombs and temples. Chopped heads are arranged vertically on horizontal layers without linear perspective to reinforce the sinister and cramped atmosphere. Overtly simplified, the painting offers a counterpoint to the dazzling exuberance of the artist’s earlier works. Instead, it depicts a compressed and somber space, bare but for a yellow sun visible through the bars.

Al-Hazima (Defeat; 1967) concludes the radical break between Sirry’s figurative compositions and the beginning of her abstract period (fig. 13). The devastating moral aftermath of the 1967 Third Arab-Israeli War echoes in the inanimate painting as Sirry depicts herself standing firmly on the left. A shadow without clothes, she confronts the viewer. Functioning within a field that sways from Pan-Arab pride to shame, a landscape of ruin betrays the personal feelings of disillusionment. Behind the unshakable thousands-year-old gold pyramid appears a red patch, the sun. Is it setting or rising? It does not matter, as Sirry diligently points to the eternity of Egypt. 

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