Latifa Echakhch

Latifa Echakhch left Morocco when she was three years old. That might explain why cultural expression has always had an 
element of nostalgia for her, mainly
 highlighting the absence of things. Her remedy is to divest cultural relics of their functional meaning in order
to reassess them. This is only possible
if you disconnect well-known objects from their original meaning. Only by
tackling prejudices can you remove the veil of national and religious identity. Through simple manipulation and a slightly different perspective Latifa Echakhch enables her viewers to look at things as though they were seeing them for the first time.

In Tambour 11' she drips jet-black ink onto a tondo, one of the round paintings traditionally mounted in the middle of a ceiling to
represent heaven. Placed on the floor, 
Echakhch drips the ink on the tondo, like a target, connecting with artists like
Jackson Pollock. Only she is infinitely more systematic. Ink is normally used for writing, but the length of time it
 takes the ink to drip and to create the jet-black hole, symbolises the death of free speech, a black hole from which
nothing can escape.

Likewise in Micro Vide the microphones
have no membranes and in Sans Titre XXVI the carbon – symbol of the distribution of free
speech in times gone by – remains
unused and without function. In this context, omission
and removal are means of adding substance.