Before the Storm
ColAAb x mouni fatmi
Before the Storm (curtains/japanese panels), 2022
Silk-screen print on fabric, variable dimensions (made to measure).
Signed and numbered edition, limited to 50 pieces.
Before the Storm (curtains), 2022
Weaving, embroidery, limited, signed and numbered edition: 8 + 4 A.P.
mounir fatmi uses all types of mediums - installations, videos, sound pieces, photos, sculptures, drawings, collages. His work focuses on deconstruction as a metaphor for the present and future world, deals with exile, displacement, identity, memory, religious and political issues, the relationship of art to architecture or space.
Since 1998, mounir fatmi uses the television antennas' white cables - symbolizing the links and networks of the globalized media society. He presents them as installations, in the form of low reliefs. He runs them across walls or assembles them, braids them, intertwines them on wooden panels. He films them or places them based on art history, on sufi mysticism, etc. Cables are for him multiples roots which speak about tomorrow's society : “One interesting point about globalization, is to connect each other and to leave identity-based isolation”.
For ColAAb, he imagined other variations on this matter of network by offering curtains or screen-printed or woven and embroidered hangings. For the artist, the curtain is at the same time linked to theater and to one of the major art history themes, the window, but also to the essence of his work, that of the link between writing and power, form and information. For mounir fatmi, the “visual only the information's residual”. On those textiles thought like a painting, which can give light or hide it, he shows curves, overlayed, framed, intertwined, of various colours. He shows the ones, medical, of our beating hearts, the ones the media world was flooded with at the time of the Covid pandemic, those, financial, of the stock exchange ... He says that these patterns, these shapes that “nobody can decipher, it is like Arabic calligraphy that nobody can read”. Before the storm, beautifully composed of bright colours where blue dominates, is another way of thinking about tapestry, of giving meaning to interior spaces.
Photos: © Andréa Valienne and Aurélien Mole - Texts by Pascale Le Thorel