While Morocco had no Tahir Square or no-fly-zone implemented this past spring, the effects of the protests that swept North Africa weren’t lost on the country: the King conceded new powers to the parliament, resulting in a much-anticipated election earlier this month and the ascension to power of a new, moderate Islamist party. Caught in this flux of democracic progression is the Marrakech Biennale’s fourth edition, “Higher Atlas” (29th February – 3rd June 2012). Curated by Berlin-based architecture writer, curator, and PROGRAM Initiative for Art & Architecture Collaborations director Carson Chan together with London-based independent curator and art historian Nadim Samman, the biennale has been forced into a state of adaptation, rolling with the ever-changing context of the region in preparation for what will be by-far its most visible iteration to-date.
ARTINFO Berlin spoke with Chan about the fallout from protest, the challenges of reassessing post-colonialism, and why it's important to break the rules.
The Marrakech Biennale is distinguished among its brethren in that it combines the film, art, and literature. Are you all working in concert towards a conversation between the mediums?
Well, there’s the film, literature, and the art. All three are run by different people. So, myself and my co-curator Nadim Samman, we’re running the art. But within that we’ve also invited writers, composers, bands, musicians. We invited the band Coco Rosie and they are doing an installation, they’re recording an album in Marrakech. We invited Gideon Lewis-Kraus, who’s New York based — he’s a writer for Harpers Magazine and he’s writing a piece. We invited a composer, Christopher Mayo, and he’s writing a symphony. And we invited architects to be involved as well.
How did your background in architecture influence the exhibition? I remember you saying over the summer that a lot of it was based on the architecture of El Badi Palace and that you were going to be doing a lot of site-specific installations?
Yeah, well, some things have changed in terms of the site in the last week or so, which has been a bit nerve-racking. There’s just been general elections in Morocco and so we have a new cultural minister. In the fallout of this really momentous event for the country we lost El Badi, so the site-specificness of it is changing into what we could call a context-specificness. The context of North Africa right now is that it’s a tumultuous area of the world. The people there are really voicing their own sovereignty, their own ambitions, and it’s really exciting to be there. But part of being involved in that excitement is to accept a lack of groundedness in one’s own projects. So, the funding hasn’t changed, the support hasn’t changed, everything hasn’t changed, except the location. We’ve found three other locations, and we’ve been in touch with all the artists, and they’ve all been really supportive and understanding in adapting to the new situation.
It’s kind of a great irony in a way, given that the title of the biennale “Higher Atlas” invokes the notion of transcending cartography. Now you’re transcending the actual physical space where it was supposed to be.
Yeah, we’re definitely going to capitalize on the turn. It was really hard to take but one deals and continues and tries to do a good thing in the end. The support has been so unanimously strong.
With that though comes the issue that the biennale has always been supported by the west financially, by Vanessa Branson in particular, which puts it in a kind of precarious post-colonial space. Is that something you are contending with within the exhibition itself?
That kind of colonialist gesture hasn’t escaped us for sure. I think one can reflect on it through post-colonialism or one can reflect on it by saying, “well, Morocco is in fact part of the international community.” It’s been what, half a century, so to say that anyone going to do a project there is a post-colonial gesture is kind of like beating an old horse. For sure none of the officials and business people we’re working with there feel such a thing. They have the upper hand, actually. They call the shots. And within our board and our management, the whole team is Moroccan. I’m not, but everyone else is. Vanessa’s money, I mean she’s British but I’m from Hong Kong. People are from all sorts of different places. More importantly, I think, is how a post-colonial identity has affected people in Morocco. It was a French protectorate from 1912 to 1956, so French as a language was installed, certain codes of how to operate, what to show, what culture is being expressed was dictated by the French for a long time. When they became independent in ’56, Morocco was desperate to show that they were international, so the artists adopted Abstract Expressionism as their mode of communication because — I mean think about MoMA and New York at that time, Abstract Expressionism was the international mode of art. But, to this day, the schools there still teach Abstract Expressionism. So I think the relationship Morocco has within itself to a cultural legacy of aesthetics is exactly what we’re addressing. We’re addressing an audience that didn’t grow up looking at contemporary art exhibitions. We’re addressing an audience that finds art, contemporary art specifically, the realm of the elite. So we’re doing a lot of children’s programs, and we’re doing our internship programs with local university students. They administer large aspects of the biennale.
In a way it reminds me of the Tate Triennial in 2009, "Altermodern," in terms of this similar interest in looking at ways in which the contemporary has now moved into a space of transcending boarders, previous nomenclature of “post-colonial," disciplines, and ridding these boundaries from exhibition-making and practice.
Yeah, I mean that’s sort of why we felt the license to invite musicians, bands, writers, composers, architects to a contemporary art biennale is because these boundaries didn’t exist in the first place, these are boundaries that we in the west have created, so why adhere to them when we don’t have to.
How will the music function within the biennale? Will there be specific performances coinciding with Surrender, the opening, or will they be featured throughout the run of the exhibition?
It’s funny actually, because "Surrender" is just a name that Vanessa thought of: surrendering to ones senses but also playing with misreading of the term within an Arab situation. But who’s surrendering to whom. The music will be concerts. But the live stuff with the composer, there’s many sound pieces in the show, it’s recorded and then projected again. It’s done periodically, which we thought was kind of nice; I don’t know if you’ve been to Marrakech before but the call to prayer is very present there. So we wanted to work with the aural, the audio context of the space as well.
So there’s some ritualistic sense to it? I know exactly what you mean when you’re in Marrakech, or anywhere in the Arab world for that matter, you’re going to wake up at 5 a.m., for a little while at least.
Yeah, the symphony that Chris is going to write for us isn’t going to be played continuously but periodically throughout the day, so it takes on a similar ritualistic quality.
You said that you were mainly focusing on emerging artists but are there any ties of praxis or certain things in particular that bring together this group of people?
The reasons have been different for everyone. For, let’s say Alexandra Domanovic, who’s doing amazingly well in her own right, she’s from Slovenia but born in former Yugoslavia. So this idea of a mixed cultural heritage that I was describing about Marrakech exists for her. We wanted her to reflect on that aspect. Elín Hansdóttir deals a lot with direct spatial experiences. So we wanted to have her produce something that you don’t need to read anything, you don’t need to know anything about art to experience it.
So you’re mediating another way of accessing the exhibition within the context of this cultural legacy of not being exposed to contemporary art.
Right, they may have seen images on the Internet, but in a way that we in Berlin or in New York aren’t exposed to it. Names like Jackson Pollock are household names in New York, but there it wouldn’t be. So to see something referring to a Jackson Pollock painting would mean something different to someone there. But to be experiencing a space as it is, and that being the piece itself, is universal. The same goes for our other Icelandic artist, Finnbogi Petursson. He’s 60, so he’s not emerging in that sense, and he’s done so many great things, but he really works with primary experience as well.
What else are you working on at the moment in preparation for February?
Actually, the reader is something that we’re strongly developing right now because there isn’t so much writing out there on North African contemporary art exhibition-making. So we wanted to make the catalogue much more of a reader that discusses this as opposed to a kind of catalogue that has face-shots of all the artists. It will center on a lot of the problematics that you’re talking about. We’re also working very closely with a residency program in Marrakech called Dar Al-Ma’mûn and they’re housing a number of our artists, producing a number of the works, so that’s something that’s been really exciting as well.
So the catalogue more of an intellectual history of art in the region?
We’ve found scholars who have been specifically working on it. Katarzyna Pieprzak wrote a book on contemporary art exhibits in Morocco, so she’s in the catalogue. And also the idea of, instead of post-colonialism, let’s call it cultural exchange, so we’ve got Tirdad Zolghadr who did the UAE pavilion at Venice [in 2009]. He’s a writer, curator, and he’s going to act as an interlocutor and comment on all of the essays. So the idea of one person coming into another system to give a certain comment is within the structure of the book as well.