partition pour main et masse

At the Chapelle Saint-Jacques contemporary art center, the artist Latifa Echakhch is invited to invest the space. The work that it presents is specially thought out and produced in relation to the particular architecture and the spiritual past of the building. For the past fifteen years, Latifa Echakhch has been developing an installation, pictorial and sculptural practice that allegorically echoes a perception of the world tinged with melancholy. His work works on the symbolic and formal tension of objects and materials chosen for their potential for political and poetic evocation.

Latifa Echakhch’s works can be seen in an “après-coup” temporality, where the exhibited elements bear witness to the artist’s vigorous gestures against them. Choosing materials and objects strongly invested with an intimate or historical charge (personal effects, revolutionary equipment, household objects, show accessories, etc.), she deprives them of their use by more or less violent acts of destruction, recovery, erasure. Hollowed-out carpets show off their skeletal contours ( Frames , 2000-2010), sheets of carbon paper dripping with ink after being sprayed with alcohol ( A Each Stencil Une Révolution, 2007), poles deprived of their flags are intermingled in a wild and silent hedge ( Fantasia, 2011).

Latifa Echakhch’s work has been presented both in European contemporary art institutions (MAC Lyon, Center Pompidou, Tate Modern, Kunsthaus Zurich, etc.) and international (PS1, Hammer Museum, SwissInstitute NY), as well as at numerous biennials (Venice in 2011 and Istanbul in 2017).
She received the Marcel Duchamp Prize in 2013 and the Zurich Art Prize in 2015.

Latifa Echakhch, born in 1974 in Morocco, lives and works in Switzerland.