Expo Younes Baba-Ali
Vernissage : Thursday 20/11/14 : 18h > 21h
Exposition : 21/11/14 > 20/12/14 : Thursday > Saturday : 14h > 18h
Younes Baba-Ali is a laureate of “la Bourse COCOF MAAC 2014”. He was also the winner of Art Contest 2014.The exposition is a coproduction of MAAC & Moussem.
Younes Baba-Ali’s - art on the edge:
”My art finds its rationale in the society it emerges from. That’s its ground and its subject. I function as a mediator, as a philosopher who shares a form of awareness with others. I measure the temperature of society and contribute to its interpretation and development.”
Visual artist Younes Baba-Ali summarizes his artistic démarche in a nice way. He makes art that is unconventional, intelligent and critical, often in public space or places uncommon to art practice. He is a sharp observer and raises pertinent questions aimed at society, the institution and above all, his audience. As a free thinker he holds a mirror up to society and confronts it with its ingrained habits and dysfunctions. His art originates rarely in the atelier. It is context-specific and takes its final shape in dialogue with its spectators.
Context
Some of Baba-Ali’s works function almost exclusively in a specific environment. Moroccan Anthem for example, a video in which a donkey driver clucks out the Moroccan national anthem using the sound he normally makes to command his animal. Other installations get their meaning in relation to the place where they are shown. Like Ending your life under the sun, a coffin with a tanning bed inside it. The idea for this work emerged during his stay on the Erasmus exchange program in Poland, where people frequently visit tanning salons. Presenting the work at the 4th Marrakesh Biennial – where visitors were primarily Western – the installation was perceived as dealing with North-South migration; when it was exhibited in Europe however, the interpretation shifted more toward the idea of eternal beauty.”
Art as intervention
Ambiguity and humor are recurring elements in the work of this young artist. “I don’t want people to stay indifferent. I want to confront them and at the same time I want them to participate. I want to dispose art of its elitist and sacral status and to accomplish that I use certain strategies.” As an artist-alchemist he measures and mixes technology, objects, sound, video and photography with political, social and cultural issues. The resulting installations discreetly coerce the unsuspecting viewer into taking a stand. His work is constantly on the verge: it’s provocative, but never insulting or cheap, always inviting. It is the starting point for a conversation, a polemic, a thinking process, a (re)action.
In a subtle way the artist plays the conventional social codes and at the same time the codes of art itself. Baba-Ali’s work often assumes the form of the readymade. He uses common objects and phenomena and introduces them in an artistic environment. But he prefers the public space to spaces intended for art. Making art accessible is almost a given in his oeuvre. In reaction to the extreme theorizing of art – where the audience is as it were assessed on its insider knowledge – and to the art institute that in the way it presents the artwork raises obstacles rather than remove them, he ingeniously intervenes in everyday life with his work. Carroussa Sonore is a beautiful example of this. A caroussa is a stroller with a sound system built on top, used for selling CD’s with Quranic recitals. A very common view in urban Maghreb streets, this object is a simple but extremely intelligent piece of technology. Baba-Ali uses it for his own purposes: „With Caroussa Sonore I bring sound pieces to people in a democratic way. It is both a creation and a medium I use as an art curator, since I invited other international artists to distribute their pieces via this module. It circles in the city, we built several interventions around it. In this way it becomes part of public life.” This intervention also denounces pertinent fallacies that circulate in the art world, such as the conviction that the Moroccan – and in extension Maghrebi – art scene limits itself to marketable objects. Baba-Ali proves the opposite by creating a platform for artists that are definitely active, but have difficulty in accessing the established European art scene - not in the least due to strict visa regulations. But as Baba-Ali puts it: „sound doesn’t need a visa, only a medium”. And rather than presenting his work to the establishment, he brings it to the people. This attitude is an implicit critique of both the art world and it’s critics. Baba-Ali addresses not just the art loving elite, but the people in the street. With this attitude he shows great affinity with artists such as Hassan Darsi and Francis Alÿs. Like them he makes disruptive intervention art that confronts the viewer – whether or not ironically – with himself and his environment. Baba-Ali presents people dilemmas and taboos and challenges them to (re)act. In this way he makes them his accomplices in a disguised artistic guerrilla that unites the establishment and the common man.
Brussels:
Younes Baba-Ali was born in Oudja, Morocco but grew up and studied in France. Since 2011 he lives and works in Brussels. This double cultural background marks his life, his points of view and obviously his art. His affinity with both European and Maghrebi culture grants him the freedom to critically assess both worlds and to process this in his art practice. “As an artist I can afford to be critical. It’s my nature above all. Critique is a language that I learned to use. I raise questions and I want to involve the public. When observing Belgian society I notice that Moroccan immigration in France presents itself differently from that in Belgium. France is Morocco’s ‘big brother’, the ideal that Moroccan society and its elite try to attain. I observe the consequences of these phenomena and translate my findings into critical interventions.” An example of this is the installation Untitled (Speedbump) that he made for a group exhibition organised in a luxurious villa in the diplomatic district of Rabat. In that area – as in comparable wealthy areas in Morocco – huge speed bumps are installed. “To me this manipulation of urban space is very bourgeois and on top of that it’s immediately related to power. People in these quarters permit themselves to plump down speed bumps that are totally out of proportion. And so I decided to introduce these objects in their own living space, the bourgeois villa.” Baba-Ali does this fully aware that the audience that will visit the exhibition are the same people responsible for this phenomenon. By confronting them with it in the form of a work of art he also lends it a social dimension: “My interventions are to me also social, even political interventions that are coloured by their local context.”
In the exhibition he developed for MAAC, Baba-Ali takes his personal relation to Brussels as a starting point. He confesses he has a love-hate relationship with this city, which he perceives as very complex. Brussels proves to be an ideal laboratory for the artist to develop his oeuvre. He presents works that are on the one hand representative of how he experiences the city as a French-Moroccan immigrant, and on the other provide an insight in how the artist experiences living with the many residing nationalities there. “Brussels is a city that is distinctly multicultural – ranging from the European community to all the other immigrated nationalities – and at the same time marked by community issues.” Baba-Ali is constantly surprised by the resulting linguistic melting pot en the ongoing intercultural ‘negotiation’ that so clearly marks the Brussels public space. Since he came to Brussels he has been living in Molenbeek, a district he calls a ‘border zone’. The invisible but very distinct borders in Brussels and the way they divide the communities, are shocking to the artist. This observation leads to an artistic mental process: “my work originates in my head, not in my studio.” That process eventually comes into shape in the interaction with the audience. “I hope that people feel concerned with what I do. Positively or negatively – as long as it gets to them. I need the audience. Without it my work doesn’t function.”
In 2014-2015 Younes Baba Ali is artist in residence at Moussem.
Visual arts
Coproduction
- MAAC tickets
