Latifa Echakhch

Born in 1974 in El Khnansa, Morocco. Lives and works in Switzerland. Latifa Echakhch often introduces associations with ‘cultural mementos’ that reveal a complicated relationships, where symbolic valency is subtracted, its absence suggesting an entirely new meaning and presence. Echakhch re-imagines and re-evaluates found objects and defamiliarizes the vernacular, questioning the meaning embedded in these and, in general, our own relationship and preconceptions towards such objects. Only when supposedly known objects have been emptied of their original meaning can they be read in many ways. Referencing and appropriating the archetypes, ideologies of modernism and beyond, she reflects on the often-prejudiced perception of national and religious identities in works that are both poetic and conceptual, and questions the semantics of cultural paradigms, providing instead what the artist calls “poetic transfiguration”.