Latifa Echakhch
Latifa Echakhch | Morocco/France b.1974 | À chaque stencil une révolution (For each stencil a revolution) 2007 | One wall: carbon paper A4, glue, methylated alcohol, ed. of 3, AP | Installed size variable | Purchased 2010 with a special allocation from the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation | Collection: Queensland Art Gallery
b.1974 Morocco/France
Lives and works in Paris and Martigny, Switzerland
Latifa Echakhch draws on objects and motifs relating to her Moroccan heritage and to European and United States postwar art — minimalist art and colour field painting from the 1960s in particular. Echakhch's installations give presence to the language of politics and protest through a range of materials while also exploring how the treatment of an exhibition space can refer to forms of political expression.
À chaque stencil une révolution (For each stencil a revolution) 2007 derives its name from a quote from Yasser Arafat (1929–2004), the first president of the Palestinian National Authority who dedicated his life to negotiating Palestinian self-determination. The citation here also clearly refers to the strikes, human rights demonstrations and war protests of the 1960s, particularly the student riots of May 1968 in France and anti-Vietnam War protests globally, for which carbon paper and stencil machines were used to reproduce political flyers. The simultaneous resonance of European and US postwar art in Echakhch's work, especially with the blue monochromes of Yves Klein, underlines a disjuncture between the political claims of abstraction and the radical politics in the 1950s and 1960s. The work is completed when alcohol is poured down its dark blue surface, creating variations in the shade and texture of the carbon paper and causing the pigment to bleed and pool on the gallery floor. With this gesture, Echakhch show the carbon paper's rhetorical power drained; the work stands as an eerie monument to revolutions past.
Exhibitions (solo): 'La ronda', La Capella MACBA, Museu d' Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), Barcelona, Spain, 2010; 'Movement and Complication', Swiss Institute, New York, United States, 2009; 'Les sanglots longs', Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel, Germany, 2009; 'Speaker's Corner', Tate Modern, London, England, 2008. Exhibitions (group): 'The Spectacle of the Everyday', Biennale de Lyon, France, 2009; 'Manifesta 7', Bolzano, Italy, 2008; 'Global Feminisms', Brooklyn Museum, New York, United States, 2007; 'Heteropia', 1st Biennale of Thessaloniki, Greece, 2007; 'Go Inside', Biennale de Tirana, National Gallery of Art, Tirana, Albania, 2005; 'Organisational Forms', Skuc Galerija, Ljubljana, Slovenia, 2002.
