Latifa EchakhchThe sun and the set

Working in painting, sculpture and installations, the Moroccan-born artist Latifa Echakhch (El Khnansa, 1974) 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.

For several years now, Latifa Echakhch has renewed the tradition of the romantic landscape and its associated motive: ruin. On the occasion of her exhibition at the BPS22 — which she designed as a retro-prospective — she created, in the Grande Halle, a specific path to take through decommissioned, half-suspended decors, like the many traces and vestiges of an action that has taken place, while unveiling progressively more than seventy other works. In the second room, the artist offers an immersive experience in which the visitor is confronted with fragments of scenery echoing the theme of ruin and featuring part of the artist’s own plastic vocabulary.

Summoning the notions of loss, abandonment, and traces, the exhibition forms a set of personal landscapes where memory recalls the obsolescence of modernity and its ruins.

Curator : Dorothée Duvivier

An exhibition produced by the BPS22 with the support of galleries kamel mennour (Paris/London), Dvir Gallery (Brussels/Tel Aviv), kaufmann repetto gallery (Milan/New York) and Metro Pictures (New York).

In the framework of EXTRA, with the support of the Institut Français and the Cultural Service of the French Embassy in Belgium.