Several weeks ago, students in Professor Carol Solomon’s Curatorial Praxis class were assigned an artist whose work will be featured in the upcoming exhibition Memory || Place || Desire.  The students have spent most of the month of April researching the artists and drafting text to accompany their pictured works in the exhibition’s catalogue.  By the end of the last class on Wednesday, each student will also have given a short presentation to the class outlining his/her artist’s background and style.

The presentations and drafting process provide extra insight into each artist’s inspirations and how they have been influenced by the Maghreb.  Nick Schoen, one of the students in Professor Solomon’s class, has been researching Mustapha Akrim, an artist that visited Haverford a few weeks ago through the Mellon Creative Residencies Program.  “Focusing on Mustapha has made me realize that he’s really not just an artist, and a lot of the other artists that will be featured in Memory || Place || Desire aren’t either,” says Nick.  “Mustapha is a visionary.  He is trying to change Morocco for the better through his art, and I have a much better appreciation for him and his goals after meeting and reading about him.”

In addition to the presentations and catalogue entries, the class has also been putting together short recordings on their artists to help create the exhibition’s audio tour.  Mike Ferrara, the student that is spearheading this project, thought it would be interesting to have the students talk casually about their artist for the recordings, rather than just read the text that will be featured in the catalogue.  The recordings are nearly completed.

The class as a whole has spent some time debating the layout, fonts, and cover of the exhibition’s catalogue in the past couple weeks.  A group of students has also been brainstorming the installation design of the exhibition itself in the Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery.

With the school year coming to a close, and the departure of the artists in residence, the students of Carol Solomon’s Curatorial Praxis class continue to progress in the making of the Memory || Place || Desire exhibit.

Recently, the class met with Matthew Seamus Callihan, Associate Director of the Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery and Campus Exhibitions, to discuss the setup of the gallery.  Now, a group of students from the class have been working on several possible layouts using Google SketchUp.  The application helps students to create an accurate model of the exhibit space, and allows them to rearrange the gallery’s moveable walls and even import scaled art works onto the walls. Using SketchUp, the students are able to present a lifelike version of what the gallery space will actually look like when all of the works are in it, and thus many issues involving space can be realized in this digital format before the final set up is devised.

While the class has been educating each other on each of the artists that have works in the exhibition, Professor Solomon has been working on a satellite exhibition: Khamsa: Amulets of North Africa.  The exhibit features several Khamsas—literally meaning five—or Hands of Fatima, which will be on display.  Khamsas are hand shaped amulets, typically used in jewelry or wall hangings as a sign of good luck and protection. These amulets have Jewish and Muslim origins, and the Khamsa is referred to the hand of Fatima in Islam (named after Mohamed’s daughter) and the hand of Mariam or Mary in Judaism and Christianity.  This exhibit will coincide with Memory ||Place || Desire and will be located in Magill Library’s Alcove Gallery.

Mustapha Akrim’s residency concluded on March 27, following a farewell dinner and an interview with students about his work earlier that day. He answered questions over the course of forty-five minutes, speaking on a range of topics. Perhaps the most pressing question was the significance of his materials, especially the concrete in which Article 13, his most famous work, and Article 25, a version of which he created during his residency at Haverford, are cast. He attributed his materials to his time spent working construction with his father, a builder: “When I was in the building [industry] with my father, in the building you can find all the materials, concrete, the wood… everything… a lot of time I use the concrete, the idea became the petrification of this article. It’s very hard, it’s not accessible. It does not exist in the society, just on the paper.”

He refers here to Article 25 of the Moroccan constitution, which lends its title to the piece—a literal rendering of the text of this section of the constitution in concrete. Article 25 “talks about the freedom of expression and opinion,”  says Akrim, but “for me, when I read this part of the article that talks about the freedom of expression and opinion, when I look at my society, it’s very far [from that]; it’s not possible. I watch the TV or see in the newspaper, somebody goes to prison because he talked about the king or about government or about some person, official person, where is this freedom, where is this opinion, where is this expression?”

Akrim is among Morocco’s most prominent and political artists today, and we were privileged to host him for the time we did. Look for his Article 25, alongside the works of many other distinguished artists, in the show next fall.

Memory || Place || Desire: Contemporary Art of the Maghreb and the Maghrebi Diaspora, the exhibition opening at Haverford in October 2014, is beginning to take shape.

Last week, students in Professor Carol Solomon’s Curatorial Praxis class met with Catalogue Designer Anthony Smyrski to start hashing out the details of the exhibition’s catalogue, discussing everything from the type of paper that will be used to the spatial orientation of what will be printed on each page.  This week, students in the class visited the Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery to get to know the space that will be the future home of Memory || Place || Desire.  Matthew Seamus Callihan, Associate Director of the Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery and Campus Exhibitions, spoke to the students about all of the fine details that must be considered in the curating process.  One such detail is the gallery’s six movable walls, which can be assorted in any number of ways to customize the space for each showing.  There will also be several video works as a part of this exhibition, so making sure they do not overwhelm viewers will be another challenge.

The list of works that will be included in the fall exhibition is nearly finalized, and it includes two from Mustapha Akrim and three from Mohamed El Baz.  Both of these Moroccan artists visited Haverford in March (as a part of the Mellon Creative Residencies Program) to create works specifically for the upcoming exhibition.  There will also be works in the show by Driss Ouadahi, Kader Attia, eL Seed, and Mounir Fatmi, among others.