منير فاطمي

Evolution or death

source: highlike
Work: Michèle Cohen Hadria Intelligence of an explosive Network… A random collection of something looking like books, consisting of a compact mass, kept together by normal, commercial tape, making it resemble a “home made bomb”… When Mounir Fatmi, in our days of universal insecurity, does not refrain from razor sharp dialectics, it is just because he wants to make an urgent appeal to all societies about the seriousness of the situation. To supply those explosive book parcels, attached to the waist of young persons, not with a detonator, but with a network of open possibilities, the artist in the broadest sense of the word embraces the intellectual utopias and social convictions of a whole brain trust, thus offering us a mental product resting upon the unspoken connections between the threads of an invisible net of perception. The sense of something threatening, like the sight of those young ones with their girdles of explosives, creates an era overflowing with media events, heavily loaded with a symbolic potential that can be turned to something constructive; the aim of the artist. According to Marshall MacLuhans prophecies of a “global village”, one might conclude that a general reduction of communication distances will also lead to a symbolic space, accentuating the foggy resonance of events – events that have already been submitted to a thorough scrutinizing by subtly feudalised processes. At the same time as intellectual activities are being substituted by media communication, reducing all sense, but parading as knowledge, such a banal flood wave of sensations, however, is by no means rid of sponsoring traditional oppositions – a stubborn heritage of avoiding to confront History, exercised by the very sensation in question… And in the midst of the linguistic and symbolic confusion created by a commercialised and biased current of information, the news rendered by journalists also may contain many a story of genuine human drama. But how are we to perceive and interpret such a present, so impenetrably enigmatic and heavily loaded?… The objects/the language applied by Mounir Fatmi aims at collecting the sediments of such hyper-banalities of journalism, rendering actual events resistant to sense. Michèle Cohen Hadria Translated by Per Einar Fosser.
Photographer: mounir fatmi
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source: mounirfatmi
Une collection livresque et aléatoire, constituée en masse compacte, retenue par un ruban adhésif commercial renvoie à son analogie avec une « bombe artisanale »… En ces temps d’insécurité mondialisée, si Mounir Fatmi ne craint pas de jouer de dialectiques sur le fil du rasoir, c’est précisément pour en appeler avec urgence à la sensibilité ravivée des collectivités. Ajoutant à ces explosifs livresques ceinturant la taille de jeune gens, non un détonateur mais un circuit de connections ouvertes à tous les possibles, l’artiste convoque un entier corpus d’utopies intellectuelles et de croyances sociales au sens large pour suggérer en nous un travail mental portant sur les relations informulées d’invisibles réseaux de lectures. Par ce sentiment d’imminence émanant de jeunes ceinturés d’explosifs, ce que vise également l’artiste, c’est une époque médiatique profuse, lourde d’un potentiel symbolique toujours réversible.
Suivant de la prophétie d’un « Village global » par Marshall Mac Luhan, on en déduira que le rétrécissement de l’espace géo/communicationnel entraîne celui de nos espace symboliques accentuant ainsi la résonance – toutefois opaque – d’une actualité préalablement passée au tamis de stratégies informatives subtilement inféodées…1 Tout travail de pensée étant sur le point de se voir supplanté par une communication médiatique tenant lieu de connaissance, cette déferlante réductrice et sensationnaliste n’est toutefois nullement indemne de reconductions d’oppositions binaires traditionnelles ; tenace héritage de l’esquive d’une confrontation à l’Histoire, exercée par cette actualité même… Dans la confusion linguistique et symbolique qu’engendre la surenchère d’informations marchandisées et orientées, les messages journalistiques n’en jouxtent pas moins des drames humains, réels. Mais comment lire ce présent, dans son épaisseur énigmatique et chargée ?… Les objets/langage conçus par Mounir Fatmi visent précisément à sédimenter les formes sur/banalisées d’une actualité résistante au sens.
Michèle Cohen Hadria
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source: mounirfatmi
Né en 1970 à Tanger, vit et travaille entre Paris et Tanger.
mounir fatmi construit des espaces et des jeux de langage. Son travail traite de la désacralisation de l’objet religieux, de la déconstruction, de la fin des dogmes et des idéologies. Il s’intéresse spécialement à l’idée de la mort de l’objet de consommation. Cela peut s’appliquer à des machines photocopieurs, des câbles d’antennes, des cassettes VHS, une langue morte ou à un mouvement politique. Ses vidéos, installations, peintures ou sculptures mettent au jour nos ambiguïtés, nos doutes, nos peurs, nos désirs. Ils pointent l’actuel de notre monde, ce qui survient dans l’accident et en révèle la structure. L’œuvre de mounir fatmi offre un regard sur le monde à partir d’un autre angle de vue, en refusant d’être aveuglé par les conventions.
Son travail a été présenté au sein de nombreuses expositions personnelles, au Migros Museum für Gegenarskunst, Zürich, au Musée Picasso, la guerre et la paix, Vallauris, au FRAC Alsace, Sélestat, au centre d’art contemporain le Parvis, à la Fondazione Collegio San Carlo, Modena.
Il a participé à plusieurs expositions collectives au Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, Brooklyn Museum, New York, Museum Kunst Palast, Düsseldorf, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Museum on the Seam, Jerusalem, Moscow Museum of modern art, Moscou, Mathaf, Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, ainsi qu’à la Hayward Gallery, Londres.
Ces installations on été sélectionnées dans le cadre de plusieurs biennales, la 52ème et la 54e Biennale de Venise, la 8ème Biennale de Sharjah, la 5éme et la 7éme biennale de Dakar, la 2ème Biennale de Séville, la 5ème Biennale de Gwangju, la 10ème Biennale de Lyon.
Il a reçu plusieurs prix dont le prix de la Biennale du Caire, en 2010. Le Uriôt prize, Amsterdam, ainsi que le Grand Prix Léopold Sédar Senghor de la 7ème Biennale de Dakar en 2006
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source: mounirfatmi
Born 1970, Tangier, Morocco, lives and works between Paris and Tangier.
mounir fatmi constructs visual spaces and linguistic games.His work deals with the desecration of religious object, deconstruction and the end of dogmas and ideologies. He is particularly interested in the idea of death of the subject of
consumption. This can be applied to antenna cables, copier machines, VHS tapes, and a dead language or a political movement. His videos, installations, drawings, paintings and sculptures bring to light our doubts, fears and desires. They directly address the current events of our world, and speak to those whose lives are affected by specific events and reveals its structure. Mounir Fatmi’s work offers a look at the world from a different glance, refusing to be blinded by the conventions.
mounir fatmi’s work has been shown in numerous solo exhibition, in the Migros Museum für Gegenwarskunst, Zürich, Switzerland, at the PIcasso Museum, war and peace, Vallauris, at the FRAC Alsace, Sélestat, at the Contemporary Art Center Le Parvis, at the Fondazione Collegio San Caro, Modena.
He participated in several collective shows at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris,The Brooklyn Museum, New York, Museum Kunst Palast, Düsseldorf, Mori Art Museum in Tokyo,
Museum on the Seam, Jerusalem, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Moscow, Mathaf Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha and the Hayward Gallery, London.
His installations have been selected in biennials such as the 52nd and 54th Venice Biennial, the 8th biennial of Sharjah, the 5th and 7th Dakar Biennial, the 2nd Seville Biennial, the 5th Gwangju Biennial and the 10th Lyon Biennial.
Mounir Fatmi was awarded by several prize such as the Cairo Biennial Prize in 2010, the Uriöt prize, Amsterdam and the Grand Prize Leopold Sedar Senghor of the 7th Dakar Biennial in 2006.
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source: stephengdewyer
Fatmi inverts spectacular representations of identity by rendering them mundane and within reach of a subject that may scramble any conclusive narrative. Fatmi’s work counters strategies of interpellation that identifies a subject with an ideology prior to that subject’s ability to place their identity in or beyond a particular ideology. Fatmi parodies the various interpellations of colonialism and capitalism that seek to define others according to symbolic narratives. In Evolution or Death, 2004, (fig. 4) two Anglo-European looking subjects imitate suicide bombers with books and papers taped around their abdomens. One holds open a trenchcoat and another holds up a book that looks like a detonator attached to wires. Fatmi reverses the situation. These are not the suicide-bombers from Arab and Muslim countries. Instead, they appear to be of European descent in a European street or modern room in casual clothing.
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source: mounirfatmi
A random collection of something looking like books, consisting of a compact mass, kept together by normal, commercial tape, making it resemble a “home made bomb” … When Mounir Fatmi, in our days of universal insecurity, does not refrain from razor sharp dialectics, it is just because he wants to make an urgent appeal to all societies about the seriousness of the situation. To supply those explosive book parcels, attached to the waist of young persons, not with a detonator, but with a network of open possibilities, the artist in the broadest sense of the word embraces the intellectual utopias and social convictions of a whole brain trust, thus offering us a mental product resting upon the unspoken connections between the threads of an invisible net of perception. The sense of something threatening, like the sight of those young ones with their girdles of explosives, creates an era overflowing with media events, heavily loaded with a symbolic potential that can be turned to something constructive; the aim of the artist.
According to Marshall MacLuhans prophecies of a “global village”, one might conclude that a general reduction of communication distances will also lead to a symbolic space, accentuating the foggy resonance of events – events that have already been submitted to a thorough scrutinizing by subtly feudalised processes. At the same time as intellectual activities are being substituted by media communication, reducing all sense, but parading as knowledge, such a banal flood wave of sensations, however, is by no means rid of sponsoring traditional oppositions – a stubborn heritage of avoiding to confront History, exercised by the very sensation in question … And in the midst of the linguistic and symbolic confusion created by a commercialised and biased current of information, the news rendered by journalists also may contain many a story of genuine human drama. But how are we to perceive and interpret such a present, so impenetrably enigmatic and heavily loaded? … The objects/the language applied by Mounir Fatmi aims at collecting the sediments of such hyper-banalities of journalism, rendering actual events resistant to sense.