mounir fatmi at the MOCA Collection in L.A.

The Museum of Contemporary Art of Los Angeles has acquired the piece 'The Blackboard', by Baró Galeria's represented artist mounir fatmi, an installation that seeks to "questions our relationship to education by offering experimentation and observing its effects on the individual".

 

The installation is presented as a labyrinth of classroom blackboards, intersepted by bright fluorescent lights and intervened with chalk drawings representing two recurring motifs: straight lines and spirals "in a clearly repetitive and harsh gesture".

 

 

This artwork is representative of fatmi's entire body of work. By using materials such as antenna cables, typewriters and VHS tapes, the artist elaborates an experimental archeology that questions the world and the role of the artist in a society in crisis. He twists its codes and precepts through the prism of a trinity comprising Architecture, Language and Machine. Thus, he questions the limits of memory, language and communication while reflecting upon these obsolescent materials and their uncertain future. fatmi’s artistic research consists in a reflection upon the history of technology and its influence on popular culture. Consequently, one can also view fatmi’s current works as future archives in the making. Though they represent key moments in our contemporary history, these technical materials also call into question the transmission of knowledge and the suggestive power of images and criticize the illusory mechanisms that bind us to technology and ideologies.