Collective Memories 70-85 Mustufa Akrim / ذاكرة مشتركة 70-85 مصطفى أكريم

With Collective Memory, Mustapha Akrim appropriates one of the most pervasive and widely circulated media of official postcolonial visual culture, the Moroccan dirham. At stake here is how visual representation affects political representation and vice versa. “Through his recent series of paintings and drawings inspired by the Moroccan dirham, Akrim chooses to put into perspective the representation of work and the post-colonial state iconography of which the currency is an emblem. Extract the archives of the official past to propose new representations of the future; question the massive nature of the production of money whose ephemeral visual identities exist everywhere in large numbers (even if they are not often seen or known). And invite the viewer to observe these replicas and reconstructions of coins now out of circulation which would be retained from history. This is how Mustapha Akrim appropriates one of the most widespread and widely distributed media of official visual culture, the Bank of Morocco notes. As political scientist Wambui Mwangi notes, currency has long functioned as a propaganda or advertising medium for the State, especially at key moments in history, such as in the first decades following independence or following major political changes. Thus, the challenge of the artist's adaptations is to ask how visual representation affects political representation and vice versa. But it is also about thinking about what affects collective consciousness and memory, and to ask how the ephemera of the past can make possible new representations of the present and the future. » Emma Chubb

English; Arabic; French