مهدي لحلو جورج

72 Vierges

source: lyndensculpturegarden

Brussels-based French/Moroccan artist Mehdi-Georges Lahlou spends part of the autumn at Lynden in a research-and-production residency creating his first outdoor work in the United States, a site-specific version of his sculpture 72 Vierges (2012). A provocateur as interested in raising questions as in making objects, Lahlou explores religious and sexual identity in his work, drawing on his varied upbringing and his training as a dancer.

The original 72 Vierges was comprised of 72 white plaster busts of the artist, each covered by a white Muslim veil, representing the 72 promised houris that a Muslim martyr can hope to meet in paradise. In its Lynden manifestation, the 72 white veils are hung like flags from 72 white poles. Outdoors, the installation’s elements are in constant dialogue with the natural elements–wind, snow, the color of sky and leaves–creating a poetic movement in an otherwise minimal proposition. White, the color of mourning for Muslims and of purity for Christians, is also the color of the flags used to signal peace, truce or surrender under the Hague Convention of 1899.

Additional support for Mehdi-Georges Lahlou’s residency comes from Galerie Dix9 – Hélène Lacharmoise, Paris, France.

Born in 1983 in Les Sables d’Olonne, France to a Muslim father (a jeweler) and a Spanish Catholic mother (a flamenco dancer), Mehdi-Georges Lahlou grew up in France and Morocco. He studied in Nantes, France, and in Breda, the Netherlands and currently lives and works in Brussels and Paris, spending an increasing amount of time in Chicago. Lahlou’s solo exhibitions and performances have taken him to France, Belgian, Germany, Ukraine, Canada and the United States (most recently at Chicago’s Defibrillator), and to the 2011 Venice Biennial. His work is in the collection of the Frac Midi Pyrénées in Toulouse, France as well as many private collections.

More about Mehdi-Georges Lahlou by Marie Moignard (translated by Philippe Dumaine)

Mehdi-Georges Lahlou is the enfant terrible of an art that does not exist. Or not yet, since he is in the process of inventing it. How to be an artist of the interstice today, when navigating between north and south, between cultures, between several media, between multiple intertwined notions? “Do not see the problem through the wrong end of the telescope” is what he seems to (omit to) tell us.

By way of a reinvented surrealism, Mehdi-Georges Lahlou has chosen to show us, as through a keyhole, what we refuse to see, know, or understand. With the dual identity that follows him like a second skin – given his compound name – Mehdi-Georges guides us in his interior world, sprinkled with his wild kid antics. He raises the burlesque to a high art status, playing with the symbols of the Muslim tradition, opposing them to the one, arrogant and showy, of its red stilettos. More than fetishes, these shoes are a kind of “animal totem” for the artist, both cathartic and vector of representation.

While questioning the field of possibilities forever irreconcilable, he invests his own body as a ground for reflection on the “sexual body” faced with identities, including religious, and likes to divert the signs of traditional culture to engage in a new “Muslim aesthetic.”

His performances, fueled by his early training as a dancer, leave a bittersweet taste in the mouth, and the knowingly caused laughter can quickly turn sour. His stubbornness to achieve the wildest challenges, with a seriousness bordering on insolence, at the same time tries to downplay the thorniest issues raised by his work and to replace them, incognito, at the forefront: the clichés associated with Muslim women, nudity, sexual gender in spirituality, are as many subjects, both sensitive and essential, so rarely treated with such rigor. Because beyond the inevitable provocation rests, at the core, the strength of commitment.

“Someone told me that the wonder had passed,” he writes, as a disillusioned child, in champagne-colored letters, or on gold paper. Well, not quite, since Mehdi-Georges is still looking for it.
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source: huffingtonpost.

The 29-year-old French-Moroccan artist Mehdi-Georges Lahlou has had an eventful early career. The two works hit on several sensitive issues in Muslim culture: the prohibition on modifying one’s body, nudity, sexuality, and improper use of the Koran and religious objects. With his loose combination of religious iconography and incongruous objects, the ambiguous humor in Lahlou’s work is often misunderstood. “I’m not an activist shouting. I am truly respectful of religions and beliefs, except when they kill or hurt people,” Lahlou explains. Lahlou was born in a seaside town on France’s Atlantic coast to a Muslim father, a jeweler, and a Catholic mother, a flamenco dancer.
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source: monopol-magazinde

Meine Arbeit ist weitgehend autobiografisch. Ich bin das wichtigste Sujet meiner Kunst. Durch meinen familiären Hintergrund stehe ich an der Grenze zwischen der muslimischen und der christlichen Kultur. Meine Arbeit zielt darauf ab, unmögliche Verbindungen zwischen diesen beiden zu entdecken; meine eigene Position zu erkunden; Wissen zu ergattern, sozusagen eine neue Nostalgie zu entwickeln. So ist es klar das ich Symbole verwende die mir viel bedeuten, die mir überliefert wurden, manchmal auch auferlegt. Ich wurde jedoch nie zu etwas gezwungen: Es gibt kein Zwang im Islam, obwohl man das manchmal wünschen würde. Die muslimische Ästhetik verwende ich weil sie hohe Bedeutung für mich hat; ich versuche sie mit westlichen Elementen zu verbinden, und die Koexistenz von beiden zu zeigen.”
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source: yawmalyaum

Este artista franco-marroquí juega con la blasfemia exponiendo azoras coránicas en su cuerpo desnudo. La Feria de Arte de Marrakech 2011 quedó escandalizada.

Con sus 28 años se atreve: el discurso del artista no es ofender la sensibilidad de ciertas personas, sino representar su doble pertenencia, hijo de madre cristiana y padre musulmán. Lo que quiere mostrar es la expresión del cuerpo en una cultura mixta. Si se observa su obra se puede ver que utiliza el mismo juego con símbolos cristianos.
Koranic Inlay, de Lehlou
“El Corán es sagrado, no se debe escribir sobre el cuerpo y sobre todo, no sobre los órganos sexuales con el fin de exponerlo”. Sin embargo, en su página web, Mehdi-Georges Lahlou afirma que jamás quiso insultar a los miembros de la comunidad musulmana:

“Somos completamente conscientes de la incomprensión que puede haber frente a la fotografía ‘Koranic Inlay 2010″…

Lo que está claro es que la intolerancia frente a la creación artística contemporánea no es exclusiva del Islam, en absoluto. Como ejemplo tenemos el revuelo que se formó con la película La última tentación de Cristo, la película de Scorsese.