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.