Mounir Fatmi

mounir fatmi was born in 1970 in Tangiers, Morocco. He studied at the Academy of Arts in Rome, at the Casablanca Art School in Morocco and the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. He lives and works between Spain and Morocco. Influenced by the idea of obsolete media and the collapse of industrial and consumerist civilization, fatmi reflects on the status of art as something between archive and archaeology. He uses superannuated materials such as antenna cables, old typewriters or VHS cassettes and works on the notion of experimental archaeology by examining the artist’s role in a society in crisis. He plays on the codes and precepts of the latter under the prism of the trinity of language, architecture, and machine. In this way, he questions the limits of memory, language and communication while reflecting on materials that are becoming obsolete and have uncertain futures. The artistic research of mounir fatmi constitutes a thought on the history of technologies and their influence on popular culture. Although they mark critical moments in our contemporary history, the technical materials used by the artist also challenge the transfer of knowledge, the suggestive power of images and criticize the illusory mechanisms that link us to technology and ideologies.