reviews mounir fatmi
Mounir FAtMi:
Fuck Architects: chApter 1
Lom bard-freid Projects, new York
19 october – 24 novem ber
The scorn expressed in the provocative title of Tangiers-born Mounir France unsettled by the growing anger of its disenfranchised Muslim
Fatmi’s New York solo debut is directed less at the likes of Frank Gehry and immigrants. While Fatmi’s work engages many of these tensions, his
company than at architects of the capital ‘A’ variety. Espousing a profound critique of structures of coercion and control is open-ended, extending
but playful nihilism, Fatmi deploys an arsenal of tacit and symbolic signature to both sides of the ‘war on terror’-prescribed civilisational divide. Two
materials – equestrian paraphernalia, VHS cassettes, coaxial antenna cables recent photographs from Fatmi’s ongoing Evolution or Death series show
and wires – to critique the value systems, ideologies and technologies that shirtless young women wearing belts of books interconnected by a tangle
shape and control our contemporary existence. of coloured wires. Tinged with eroticism, these images acknowledge the
Obstacles (19 Poles) (2007), a trio of multicoloured horse jumping romance and sexiness of youthful idealism and revolutionary zeal. While
obstacles, interrupts the entry hallway, shepherding the viewer into the reference to contemporary suicide bombers is clear, Fatmi’s carefully
the main gallery space. Marked by class and colonial privilege, these selected texts suggest subtler readings. Included alongside revolutionary
spatial obstructions recreate the immigrant’s struggle to assimilate as texts by Marx and Mao are Stendhal’s On Love (1822) and Marcel Pagnol’s
a phenomenological experience. Similarly, Fatmi skilfully reuses VHS Manon of the Spring (1963); while the former is an attempt to rationally
cassettes and coaxial cables as material metonyms for the packaged deconstruct a strong passion, the later recounts a Provençal story where
information that increasingly constructs and controls our lives, promising ostracism, oppression and injustice inspire a powerful desire for vengeance.
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but rarely delivering real connection. For the 31-foot-long Skyline (2007), As reincarnations of Gudrun Ensslin or Ulrike Meinhof, Fatmi’s European
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Y Fatmi creates a mediated cityscape out of unwound cassettes attached models shift the frame of reference from fundamentalist Islam to left-

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to the wall so that the outward facing white spools mimic the city’s wing radicalism gone violent in Europe’s own recent past, acknowledging

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twinkling lights. The modular installation recreates the promised order of that terrorism is not a culture-specific symptom of Islam’s enduring
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modernist architecture while the tangled pools of magnetic tape convey medievalism but has roots in Europe itself. Fatmi’s nonpartisanship is
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the overwhelming chaos of information- and media-saturated urban lives. most pithily conveyed in the existential one-liner God Is Dead (2007),

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In Bas-Relief (Pieta) (2007) – a wall relief of the famous sculpture cleverly a digital video that cycles between screens stating ‘“God is Dead” by
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rendered using cable and plastic staples – the staples interrupt the cable’s Nietzsche’ and ‘“Nietzsche is Dead” by God’. Setting up a tautology
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a linearity, creating a fuzzy, connect-the-dots-style image, suggesting that in whereby the secular and the religious extinguish each other, the video is an
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the media age religious morals are hard to resolve. unsettling prognostication of a not wholly unimaginable future apocalypse.

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s Like fellow Paris-based North Africans Kader Attia and Adel Murtaza Vali
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Abdessemed, Fatmi’s rise to art world prominence has occurred in a
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121 Artreview
JAN_REVIEWS.indd 121 4/12/07 15:35:26
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