Our discovery of the Moroccan video-artist Mounir Fatmi goes back to the lengthy, fertile cooperation with Heure Exquise! Last year, through HE! we had one of his tapes in the program (Deux poèmes pour mourir) which went over extremely well, and this year, we again received a special reference from Thierry Destriez of HE! about Mounir Fatmi.
He was born 1970 in Tangiers, Morocco, has studied at the Accademia Di Belle Arti di Roma and has also devoted time there to computer graphics. He comes, however, from the plastic arts, later becoming acquainted with the possibilities of expression in video, occupying him self with video installations, perfomances and one-channel-tapes.
The most obvious aspect of his work is that Fatmi has a style of his very own, which again and again is interspersed with Moroccan characters and symbolisms.
His works are abstract, even if as in "Deux poems pour mourir" there are people, who through the work on the electronic texture become nearly virtual.
Fatmi is inspired again and again by symbolisms from the world of media: he uses antennas, TVs, satelli­ tes, as well scientific pictures like ultrasound scans, never however as such but in a different way giving them metaphoric content. He likes to work with other artists, with dancers, poets, musicians and choreo­graphers. In 1997, he has created the video pictures for a ballet (Adonis Theater of Zinoun) and expanded the material to create his own video. In regards to content, again and again he looks for topics about that, which holds people together and things which threaten this cohesion. His themes are the communication and the language, these fragile bonds between people.
His pictures are enormously intensive despite their partial abstractiveness, sometimes incredibly beautiful, sometimes darkly alarming. L'alphabet rouge; Personne n'est seul, rien n’est solide; Deux poèmes pour mourir; Survival Signs