ARRIVING IN THE FORMER (INTERMITTENT) IMPERIAL CAPITAL OF MARRAKECH after a few days in Casablanca—Morocco’s economic powerhouse during the French Mandate—was a shock. Although only two and a half hours apart by car, the two cities could not feel more different: Casablanca’s wide, tram-lined boulevards and somewhat laid-back architectural modernism in glistening Mediterranean white contrasts with the earthy reds of Marrakech’s buildings, old and new, its continental climate with swooping temperatures, and, above all, its overwhelming hypersaturation of tourists. After arriving at Jemaa al-Fna square with my luggage, and a flawed idea of the whereabouts of my riad, I spent the next hour fleeing at least a dozen unwanted solicitations from local young men who insisted on helping me find my destination.
Once unburdened by my bags, I soothed my worked-up nerves by moving up an obligatory pilgrimage to the famed Jardin Majorelle on my schedule. The villa and its expansive grounds was built for Jacques Majorelle, a middling Orientalist painter, who took up residence in Morocco upon the invitation of the Mandate authorities. In 1980 it became the third Marrakech home of the power couple Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé. The villa’s dark electric blue—think International Klein Blue but with less of a purple tinge—was part of Majorelle’s original design, but the gardens, with its boisterously diverse, soulful-looking cacti and forbiddingly straight sightlines across the ponds, were reconceived by the landscape architect Madison Cox upon Saint Laurent and Bergé’s request.
Although I was ready to slip into bed with a newly bought copy of Bergé’s Lettres to Yves, I resolved to take advantage of my proximity to the hip Guéliz neighborhood, where the majority of the city’s galleries are concentrated. At SINIYA28, a band of self-taught, Essaouira-based artists presented formally condensed supernatural visions (particularly impressive was Ali Maimoun’s entangled anthropomorphizing blobs executed in acrylic and sawdust). The exhibition at Galerie 127 largely traced Carolle Bénitah’s use of red thread over the years. A standout work, The Magic Books, 2012, is a riposte to Marcel Broodthaers’s Pense-Bête, 1964, and features self-help books trapped in cocoons of shiny red yarn.
An old-world atmosphere seeped through all three Art Deco floors of the recently established art center Comptoir des Mines, with the exception of a small but packed group show curated by Hassan Hajjaj: All eight solo shows that constituted the Comptoir des Mines’s “Poésies Africaines” were by male artists. I realized much later that the gentleman who introduced himself as “Monsieur Daoudi” in a chilling Mohammed Kacimi mini-survey was Hicham Daoudi, the art center’s founding director and the director of the Casablanca-based auction house Compagnie Marocaine des Oeuvres et Objets d’Art.
By the time I made it to the Museum of African Contemporary Art Al Maaden (aka MACAAL) the next morning, on the southeastern precipice of the city, the institution’s young president Othman Lazraq, heir to the Lazraq and Groupe Alliances hotelier and real estate fortunes, and the curators of the exhibition “Material Insanity,” Meriem Berrada and Janine Gaëlle Dieudji, had already delivered their welcoming remarks. I was immediately drawn to Nairobi-based Cyrus Kabiru’s futuristic eyewear from salvaged objects, as the artist did not attempt to disguise the roughness of the raw material as a fashionable act of “upcycling.” When I asked about his relation to fashion design, Kabiru admitted to being intimidated by the rate at which fashion devours innovation, and added: “I just feel safe in the gallery.”
Upstairs, Arlene Wandera furnished me with the backstory of her half-open golden tin can that suggestively whispers descriptions of extinct pineapple species (Centrepiece, 2016), and I excitedly reciprocated by pointing out the pineapple reference in Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Favourite. On the same floor, Younes Baba-Ali showed documentation of his performance Without Negotiation, 2018, in which he bought things, anything, from street vendors in Dakar without exiting his car or asking for a better price. Since I already felt that I was constantly being ripped off in Marrakech, with everything from taxi fares to babouches, I was captivated more by Baba-Ali’s Zen attitude and his conscious decision not to bargain than by the world of objects that rushed in through his car window, including “Europe” chewing gums, generic Viagra, and a Muslim prayer book for young girls.
Lunch was served at the nearby Al Maaden Golf Resort restaurant, which also belongs to the Lazraq family. After sharing notes on the intricate legal frameworks (or lack thereof) for alcohol consumption across the Middle East and North Africa with some of the artists featured in the exhibition, I had to peel myself away from the tagine-and-vin gris bliss in order to take a caddy tour of the large-scale sculptures scattered across the golf courses. It occurred to me that my take on MACAAL’s sixth group show and the golf resort–cum–sculpture park were pretty much the same: The works themselves often seemed like islands and I had no idea why they were there together, but there were still moments of self-evident brilliance, as with Antonio Seguí’s gigantic pop caricature of a golfista. As for MACAAL, it was a relief to see a museum of African contemporary art embrace being a platform for younger and less widely circulated perspectives in Africa—works by Adrian Piper, Nari Ward, and the unavoidable Hajjaj were more the exception than the norm.
Later that day, I also briefly dipped my feet in the second Marrakech edition of the 1-54 fair, which was accompanied by a Karima Boudou–curated public program, the 1-54 Forum. This year, the main inspiration for the forum was the Afro-Surrealist beatnik Ted Joans. After a brief look around, I hastened toward the École Superiéure des Arts Visuels de Marrakech in the early evening to catch archival videos of Joans performing his poems, including a reading on the occasion of a posthumous Jean-Michel Basquiat show at New York’s Tony Shafrazi Gallery. One poem culminated with a sonorous “JMB LIVES!”
There was more in store at La Mamounia (the landmark luxury hotel hosting the fair) the following day: Joanna Pawlik of the University of Sussex delivered an eye-opening lecture about the little that remains of Joans’s visual art, unpacking his appropriation of then emerging “hipster” culture of the 1960s. As Joans occasionally lived in Morocco, I wondered if he would be as bothered as I was with La Mamounia’s employment of exclusively darker-skinned men as doormen (in Morocco, this seemed to be a trend) and dressing them in Mandate-era red cape uniforms.
In the end, it took me a little less than two hours to carefully go through eighteen booths at the fair. Casablanca heavyweights Loft Art Gallery and L’Atelier 21 (which also took over Comptoir des Mines’s hangar-like annex for a solo show of Yamou’s work) were both present, with the latter focusing entirely on drawings—most notably, Leipzig-based Nabil El Makhloufi’s minimalist white-on-black pencil drawings of men engaged in an unknown ceremony (The ritual, 2018). Armand Boua and Yéanzi at the Abidjan- and Dakar-based Galerie Cécile Fakhoury, on the other hand, concentrated on updating and reinventing the legacy of art brut. Yossi Milo Gallery’s booth (Pieter Hugo, Kyle Meyer, J. D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere, and Sanlé Sory) offered a tight photographic presentation themed around self-fashioning, and Copenhagen-based Mikael Andersen was showing timely and subtle juxtapositions of the work of three Mancobas (Sonja Ferlov, Ernest, and Wonga).
Galerie Poggi made the biggest impression of all, with one of the two solo booths of the fair, devoted to Parisian Djamel Tatah. Surrounded by Tatah’s depictions of blasé, ghost-like Casablanca youth against matte monochromatic backgrounds, I felt a wave of malaise—à la Anne Imhof—wash over me. “If you take out the figure, you also get a Brice Marden!” joked Jérôme Poggi, gesturing at the only piece featuring a bank against an egg-yolk backdrop. I remembered I had still not seen the Marden show at Musée Yves Saint Laurent.
But honestly, what I really needed was one last glimpse of Jardin Majorelle, next door to the Musée Yves Saint Laurent. The most overpowering site at the villa is its most understated: Tucked away in a quiet corner, a broken fluted column, spoliated from a beach in Tangiers, memorializes the couple with shattering simplicity (in a country where homosexuality is still punishable by law). This gesture by Cox—the current president of Fondation Pierre Bergé – Yves Saint Laurent, and Bergé’s husband before his death—remains as much a poetic gesture as an expression of camaraderie, love, and solidarity in a world tired of labels.
