Interviews
Vicious Circles
From our friends at REORIENT, today we bring you “Vicious Circles.” In this piece, author Samannaz Kourang Pishdadi talks with Moroccan artist Mounir Fatmi about growing up in Tangier, the inspiration of the Beat movement, and his interdisciplinary career. Fatmi says of his work, “At the beginning, I think I was very naïve thinking my work could change things. Eventually, I realised that the most important [thing] is to make works that make me change. The most important [thing] is to try to create another reality than the one imposed on us.” This article was originally published on December 14, 2015.
Mounir Fatmi. Casablanca Circles, 2012 (detail); print on baryte paper; 35 2/5 × 47 1/5 in. Courtesy of the Artist and a private collection.
History is typed. Love is geometrised. Religion is sewn. Iconoclasts dream. Saw blades chisel Arab fantasies. Springs collapse, and tape twin towers are rebuilt.
The winner of prestigious awards including those of the Dakar and Cairo biennials (2006 and 2010, respectively) has starred on the mercurial stage of the contemporary art world for the past decade; yet, Mounir Fatmi’s first bona-fide encounter with fine art, as he recalls, was as a child, when he witnessed an upside-down poster of the Mona Lisa being devoured by a sheep in a local flea market in his hometown of Tangier in Morocco. Growing up in a religious society provided his childhood days with little artistic exposure. At home, there were works of calligraphy, the image of the king (which he thought belonged to his family, until later), and a volume of the Koran that he was forbidden to touch, as it was believed his hands would sully the book.
“Growing up in Casabarata in Tangier, I was surrounded by flea-market stands full of old cameras, objects, records, clothes, antennas, cables—everything,” he recalls. “I was constantly looking at all these discarded objects having their third, fourth, or maybe [even] tenth life being resold.” According to the artist, he “loved looking through all these things, discarded stuff, and thinking about a new life for them.”
