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OUHADDOU - POLARIS

OUHADDOU – POLARIS

Galerie Polaris, 15 rue des Arquebusiers, 75003 Paris , Tel + 33 1 42 72 21 27
November 23 2024 , January 11, 2025
https://galeriepolaris.fr

With her dual Franco-Moroccan culture, Sara Ouhaddou ( born in 1987) presents a collection of new work for her third solo exhibition “les mains fertiles” at Polaris gallery.

Sara Ouhaddou’s projects are based on cultural and craft encounters, mainly in Morocco, but also in Japan, where she spent several months working with master craftsmen, as well as in Italy, the United States and France….  For Sara Ouhaddou, each creation in her artistic career is linked to a person with whom she has worked closely. Her first art teachers were her Moroccan aunts, who were all craftswomen specialising in weaving, sewing or embroidery… It is these encounters, accompanied by a mixture of cultures and transformations, that the artist revisits and showcases, in other words What interests Sara Ouhaddou above all, is this exchange with the craftspeople, working together with the available materials. For the artist, craftsmanship is a way of studying society, people and countries, but it’s also a way of understanding how these objects move around.

When Sara Ouhaddou invites us to look at a work of stained glass, ceramics or weaving, she invites us to observe the story of the people behind it. Her work is based as much on the cultural exchange as it is on the economic one that the artist gradually unravels by producing works in direct contact with the craftspeople. It’s this collaborative approach that she leads, working with the craftspeople to find new tools and new protocols to find solutions that make it possible to go beyond her/their limits, and complement the knowledge and expertise that is often on the verge of extinction.

With globalisation affecting all areas of creation, this work should be seen as an act of resistance whose aim is to create a new creative process. A process that allows Sara Ouhaddou to question her own work at every new exchange, and to reinvent herself. Creating a dialogue with contemporary art and craftsmanship is a way of revealing everything that exists, and everything that is hidden. She puts the meaning of the object on hold to give it multiple meanings. Since 2013, Sara Ouhaddou has been setting up workshops in different regions of Morocco. Concentrating on areas that are most affected by the impoverishment of local culture, she worked with the inhabitants of the village of Ait Souka at an altitude of 1,800 metres in the High Atlas, weaving woolen blankets to protect the mud-built houses from the cold.

She also went to the Ourika valley to make ceramics.  Or in Tetouan, where she spent several weeks with the last young heirs to the art of embroidery (woven unwoven series 2015)… In Japan she worked with ceramics’ masters in Tokyo, and recently in Italy, with wood in Gherdëina. In 2015, Sara Ouhaddou began to combine Amazigh oral poetry with written Arabic translations. By recovering the  Arab-Berber geometry of the language, she created her own font that she elaborates on, depending on her work, like a new universal language. This is how she underlines the singularity of her native language. Language as a means of expressing identity movements.

Whether in the Etudes paper series or in the stained-glass work/installation Il y en a toujours un au-dessus, Il y en a toujours un en dessous , based on texts by the poetess Mririda n’Ait Attik (an Amazigh poetess who lived in the High Atlas in the 19th century), in which, in which she contrasts Amazigh poetry’s insight into the running of the world with the commercial history of glassmaking in the Middle East/North Africa region and the Arabic and Amazigh languages. The 4 windows of the gallery display the work based on the poem by

Mririda N’Ait Attik

Lune, Oh lune!

qui fait et défait les saisons

toi dont la toute puissance donne à la Terre

les nuits qui engendrent la fécondité.

Or the two ceramic works Partition 5 and Partition 6, in which Sara Ouhaddou has reproduced the sounds of percussion played by her uncles to the songs of Mririda n’ait attik. For the wooden bas-relief les mains fertiles, Sara Ouhaddou created a set inspired by the words of Mririda N’ait attik. The sculptures, which depict animals native to Val Gardena, Italy (where the piece was shown in summer 2024) such as bears, snakes, wolves, foxes and eagles, are inspired by the art of zoomorphic pottery, practiced in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco since Neolithic times. Traditionally modeled in clay in Morocco (or wood, in Val Gardena) by women in front of bread ovens or cooking fires, these simple, timeless figures can be used as toys, amulets and protectors for small children. For the two stained-glass diptychs Fantasia, l’art de la cavalerie and Tbourida, l’art de la cavalerie, Sara Ouhadou points out that the glass originally from Andalusia, later replaced by French colonial glass, tells us the political and commercial history of Morocco, as well as the evolution of life in the medinas. It is the history of the world, the geopolitics of craftsmanship, that is the subject of her work. Each workshop is a space for deconstruction, with the artist superimposing history, archaeology, anthropology and economics as a space for encounter and reflection. The two tapestries, Aïn Karma, l’Hiver (Winter) and Aïn Jamâa, l’Été (Summer), represent the winter fig fields of her father’s village, and the summer harvest of her mother’s village. The small sewn ceramics representing village inhabitants, symbolized by the shape of the flowers in the Tétouan embroidery, are reminiscent of the representation of peasants in the prints of Katsushika Hokusai.

rien n’appartient à personne – tout est question d’échange :

nothing belongs to anyone – it’s all a question of exchange  Sara Ouhaddou

 

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