The exhibition « Yesterday Was a Terrible Day », the main monograph given to the video practice of the artist Mounir Fatmi on a proposal by Madeleine Filippi is open until July 02, 2022 at CASA CONTI – ANGE LECCIA located in Corsica.
Through the crystal of exile, the exhibition « Yesterday Was a Terrible Day » proposes to find or rediscover the methodology of Mounir Fatmi while repeating the historical backdrop of Corsica. Each video presented is exposed as snippets of memories. Memories of what? Of whom? Of this second when everything is reversed; when one moves away; when one transmits the heaviness of this horrible name of being the Other: exile; when “yesterday” takes an unpleasant taste.
From one work to another, we find the story of exile, from Mohammed V, to young people from migration in the suburbs of the Western world, through Mehdi Ben Barka and Salman Rushdie. The works reverberate with each other like so many memetic sequences emerging on the external layer of memory.
The figure of the exile, which is multiplied in many current practices, and often in a modeled way, by the presence of significant objects, for example the blanket, the shoes, the bags, the boats, and so on, appears thus in the video work of the artist, but in a more discrete way.
It is not for him a political discourse on the subject, but a representative reflection of the spirit of the exile, as the exhibition « Yesterday Was a Terrible Day » reveals how the idea of exile brings the memory and meaning of the last option in the foundation of an important course of force.
Considered a poem for exile, in which Mounir Fatmi brings out the excursion into the knowledge of the banished, he welcomes the viewer into a walk around the Jungian experience of individuation, which sees exile now not as a condition, but as a step towards tomorrow.
Mounir Fatmi
Mounir Fatmi was born in Morocco. His works have been recognized worldwide since the mid-2000s.
His work on interactive media combines installation, video, sculpture, drawing, painting and writing. Always being at the junction of Western and Eastern societies, he favors a basic and tasteful methodology that opposes political, strict or social doctrines. Beyond the established representations and codes, he questions the contemporary world by staging its ambiguities and interrogations, its wickedness and paradoxes.
His work, which appears as a formidable organization, crosses different fields of information, from science to reasoning, from innovation to political issues. An approach that invites us to travel the world between its lines, to track down the different points of view, refusing to be diverted by convention.
His work has been shown in various exhibitions ranging from the Migros Museum für Gegenarskunst in Zurich, to the Picasso Museum, la guerre et la paix, Vallauris, to the FRAC Alsace, Sélestat, to the Centre d’art contemporain le Parvis, to the Fondazione Collegio San Carlo, to the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum Kunst Palast, the Mori Art Museum, the Moscow Museum of modern art as well as to the Hayward Gallery in London.
He has received several awards including the Uriöt prize, the Grand Prix Léopold Sédar Senghor of the Dakar Biennale, the Cairo Biennale prize and the Silver Plane Prize of the Altai Biennale in Moscow.