L’Atelier 21 is pleased to announce the third solo exhibition of visual artist M’barek Bouhchichi.

Entitled What I am, what we are, the exhibition will be held from May 27 to July 5, 2025. Through a series of powerful portraits painted directly onto sheets of rubber, M’barek Bouhchichi continues his exploration where art, memory, and politics intertwine to give rise to a new visual order. Far from an illustrative approach, his painting becomes a space of symbolic resistance, where bodies reappear as bearers of long-marginalized histories.

In the exhibition catalog, art historian Jamila Moroder sheds light on the artist’s process with the following words:

"These pictorial presences were born from real encounters with members of the Ismgans/Ismkhan community — from which the majority of Gnaoua musicians originate — in Khamlia, in the Merzouga region in northeastern Morocco, and who left their mark on the artist; but also from remembered or imagined faces, arising from an inner space that only painting allows access to."

Indeed, Black Moroccans form the core subject of Bouhchichi’s work. Using painting — the quintessential retinal medium — the artist passionately continues his mission of making visible Black men and women, as well as the cultural practices that belong to them. Jamila Moroder comments on the artist’s obsession with this subject in these terms:

"It is not merely a material effect for aesthetic purposes, but a meaning-laden element, for it carries within it a history of catastrophe and sedimentation — a history that resonates with the Black body, steeped in History."

And she continues: "M’barek Bouhchichi’s painting is neither simple figuration nor pure representation: it unfolds as a sensitive archaeology, a practice that intertwines the depths of the earth — bitumen, mica — with light and color, to explore what an ethics of the gaze might be."

M’barek Bouhchichi’s works are part of major collections, including those of the Musée National d’Art Moderne of the Centre Georges Pompidou (France), the Helga de Alvear Museum of Contemporary Art (Spain), the Calosa Foundation (Mexico), the American Friends of the Arts in North Africa Foundation (USA), the Fondation H (Madagascar), the Mohammed VI Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (Morocco), and the Museum of African Contemporary Art Al Maaden (MACAAL, Morocco).

The artist lives and works in Tahannaout, Morocco.