Latifa Echakhch - 2019
The Breeze blows gently, making more and more noise on the foliage. This heavy noise becomes unbearable. Put the hands to the ears and run away.
Working in painting, sculpture and installations, the Moroccan-born artist Latifa Echakhch chooses easily recognisable objects invested with a domestic and/or social burden, which she silences through destruction, deletion or by restoring them. This thereby deprives them of their usage value – pushing their function into oblivion – in order to free the memories attached to them. She summons memories and frees the ghosts that emerge from these objects. The work of Latifa Echakhch is simultaneously conceptual and romantic, both political and poetic.
The breeze blows gently, making more and more noise on the foliage. This heavy noise becomes unbearable. Put the hands to the ears and run away
The paintings series have been made with black India ink and sepia ink, both commonly used for ink drawing, and which Latifa Echakhch has used a number of times before in her work (‘Tambour’, ‘Fantôme’, ‘Untitled (sepia)’). Applied to very damp canvases, the ink spreads as it is absorbed. Its extremely unpredictable contours seem to escape any attempt at control. The invading shapes evoke both microscopic growths and strange, uncanny rhizomes, which like poetic creepers draw us down into melancholy.
Currently based in the Swiss cities of Martigny and Vevey, Latifa Echakhch was born in 1974 in El Khnansa, Morocco. When she was three, her family relocated to France, where she attended the École supérieure d’Art de Grenoble and later received degrees from the National School of Arts Cergy-Pontoise and the Lyon National School of Fine Arts. She began her studio practice in 2001.
In 2007, Echakhch presented A chaque stencil une révolution at Le Magasin, Grenoble, as part of her first solo museum exhibition. Echakhch later showed the work at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Pinault Collection, Venice; and Tate Modern, London.
Echakhch won the Marcel Duchamp Prize, France’s most vaunted art award, in 2013.
