Mirages
We live in a World where it is fundamental to have a firm and definitive opinion, that’s what makes us supposedly a person with “character”. What happens unfortunately is that this opinion is based most of the time on a very deficient information, sometimes even inexistent. It’s based on what we read, what we hear, what we imagine. We built our World like a puzzle with many lacking pieces. Like the writer Oswald Spengler says in his book, The decline of Occident, “the present is a civilized era, but not a cultivated era.”. This ignorance takes us to dreadful results of intolerance. Since September 11, 2001, fateful day for the World, for the United Status and for the Arab and Muslim Countries, the fracture seems to be insurmountable. Maybe because I was born in Casablanca, Morocco, from a Moroccan and Muslim father and a German and Christian mother, maybe because I lived their unconditional love till the dead of my father in 1986, because life has taken me from Morocco to Germany, from France to Mexico, that I always believed that the barriers are in the minds of the people who create them, that another reality can exist; the reality of understanding and of growth precisely because of those differences. I don’t want to analyze the political and economical motives of the polarization. We do know them all. What rather interest me is to built bridges, underline the similarities and the richness of being different, I want to talk about the human being His creativity is not conditioned by the color of his skin, by his religion nore by his nationality. Those circumstances bring elements to enrich his artwork. The magic is created by the inner being.
Alter many stays in Dubai and as a result of exhibitions where I participated as an artist as well as a visitor, it seemed to me appropriate to organize a Contemporary Art Exhibition from Middle East and Northern Africa for the International Festival of Puebla and soshow another face of this region of the World. Yes, the radical fanatics do exist, yes, the conflicts and wars do exist, the dictators, the terrorists, the oppressed women, yes… It is a facet of the crystal. But also wonderful human being do exist, heir of ancestral cultures, who left profound traces in the history. Today, writers, poets, visual artists, calligraphers, movie directors, sources of ideas, with ideals to change a little bit this world into more consciousness, sometimes even more critics toward themselves than their own detractors.
This present exhibition is a selection realized together with Art Space Gallery en Dubai, with artists from different countries of the Middle East and the North of Africa. Many of them are participating in Christie’s auctions, they have taken part to famous biennales and have exhibited in the most important spaces of contemporary art in the World. I chose to show different supports like paintings, photography, installations, video, calligraphy, lithography, with the purpose to show the artistical diversity.
In order to allow a better understanding of the artwork, a visual travel has been integrated with photographies of three great photographers whose trajectory has been designed by the wish to discover, understand and share with the other. Also as a part of the program is a cycle of lectures with specialist who will present important topics for the region. The movie program, the poetry, the music and the presentation of books related to the Arab world will take the society of Puebla to discover and to enjoy a culture which very linked to its present and to its past
This exhibition is possible thanks to the effort and enthusiasm of many people and institutions who believe in the significance to built bridges and learn from the differences. Thank you to all.
Aziza Alaoui