Marrakech Biennale MB5
Where are we now?
February 26th – March 31st, 2014
Opening Week: February 26th – March 2nd, 2014
Artistic director: Alya Sebti
Curatorial Concept:
For centuries Marrakech has prevailed as a cultural center of North Africa. With its multiple influences featuring the “plural and porous roots” described by philosopher Edouard Glissant, Marrakech is living a key juncture of its History: its socio-political situation is combined to a blooming creativity in artistic expression with an urge to open up the access to culture. We are witnessing a rare window of time for this region and it is the moment to both ask this question and to invite a broader audience to take part in a constructive and aesthetic manner.
Since the first Marrakech Biennale in 2004, the Red City has invited contemporary artists from Morocco and the rest of the world with the aim of establishing a cultural festival as an initiator of debates and discussions through the lens of the arts. The 2014 edition of the Biennale is a dialogue between four disciplines: Visual Art, Literature, Cinema and Video, and Performing Art.
Curators from each discipline consider the theme, “Where are we now?“ and respond through their own perspectives:
Hicham Khalidi will curate the main exhibition where the vast majority of the artworks will be site specific, produced in and inspired by the context of Marrakech. This exhibition is integrated into conversations of plurality, socio-political change, contradiction, and heritage posed by Marrakech’s unique legacy and contemporary cultural predicament
Led by the writer and theater author Driss Ksikès, the Literary discipline will promote access to public space through a series of roundtables as well as performative lectures, connecting performing art and literature, but also through comics as an articulation between visual art and literature.
Performing Arts is organized by the founder of Alwaln’art, the public space festival in Marrakech, Khalid Tamer. He will create a circulation that reimagines the relationships of public space between several venues of the Biennale.
Cinema and Video will consider contemporary creations from North Africa in dialogue with other regions, particularly Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East. With the participation of the founder of the festival Casaprojecta, Jamal Abdenassar will introduce video installation as a hyphen between film, visual art, and performing art. The film screenings and roundtables will be combined by a carte blanche to the legendary Cinematheque de Tanger.