From Tangier to Marrakech, via Casablanca and Rabat, the fall art season is slowly falling into place. New venues, young scenes, anticipated returns, and photography in force: an overview of an autumn that is beginning to take shape.
By Meryem Sebti
September is always a bit sluggish in Morocco. It’s still hot, minds have barely returned from vacation, and galleries are careful not to draw their cards too early. This year, the season will really begin on September 17. But looking at what’s being prepared from Tangier to Marrakech, via Casablanca and Rabat, something is starting to stir.
In Tangier, first, the festival “Être ici” returns on September 13 for a sixth edition: one day, seven venues, artists, performances, and buildings often closed to the public. The format, almost like “Heritage Days,” is modest in duration but rather clever in its relationship to the city. After the success of Photo Tangier last June (whose exhibitions are currently being dismantled), it confirms above all Tangier’s potential for image-making: its cosmopolitan history, its architecture, its venues, that unique light that cuts through the sky just as the strait continues to draw in photographers.
In Casablanca, September 17 will mark the real kickoff. “Momentum,” an exhibition of finalists from the sixth Prix Mustaqbal, has become one of the events to watch to take the pulse of the emerging scene. This year, Bouchra Khalili, Ymane Fakhir, Abdellah Karroum, Hassan Sefrioui, and Estelle Guilié make up the jury: the lineup alone speaks to the standing the prize has gained.
The same day, Loft Art Gallery inaugurates its new space in Casablanca Finance City. The move further south is no small matter: leaving behind the Casablanca of the 1990s (the Racine district) to bet on a new neighborhood still inventing its own uses says something about the new Casa. A measured risk for a gallery whose activity increasingly plays out between its Guéliz location in Marrakech and international fairs, including Frieze Masters in October, with a solo show by Mohamed Melehi.
The rest will also play out in the galleries. On September 24, AA Gallery opens Views on the Wall with Christophe Miralles. At L’Atelier 21, Safaa Erruas returns with “Habiter l’interstice” (September 29), after a fairly long silence in Casablanca. It will be a pleasure to rediscover this important figure of the flamboyant Beaux-Arts generation (the same as Younes Rahmoun) and her singular vocabulary of false delicacy: white, thread, apparent lightness, but also the needle, the blade, and the cut. In Erruas’s work, formal softness always carries a double edge. In October, Shart willhost Fatime-Zahra Morjani, another event to keep an eye on.
In Marrakech, Meriem Bouderbala moves into Noir sur Blanc starting September 22, an opportunity to reconnect with this Tunisian artist who left a strong mark on the 2010s scene. Hassan Bourkia is eagerly awaited at Comptoir des Mines in October, a literary artist whose painting, writing, and thought have never really stopped conversing with one another.
From October 22 to 25, Art Meets You will once again bring galleries and art venues across the city together in a network: a collective format whose program will be worth watching this year.
Finally, in Rabat, the MMVI is preparing a major retrospective in November of filmmaker and photographer Daoud Aoulad-Syad, another strong signal of a season in which Moroccan photography is finally gaining the institutional standing it deserves.
This late-starting season already sketches out, with some precision, the map of the Moroccan autumn.
This translation was generated using AI. For the original text, please see the French version of this article.
