MCC Gallery presents the first major solo exhibition of multidisciplinary artist Amine El Gotaibi, a large-scale exhibition that brings together nine major projects realized between 2011 and 2021. Entitled Visite, the exhibition features more than thirty works developed over the last decade, ranging from sculpture to photography, from drawing to video installation.
Taking over the space of MCC Gallery with an immersive scenography and a labyrinthine tour designed by the artist himself, Visite immediately plunges the visitor into an aesthetic world where dream and reality merge, translating the imagination of those who walk the paths El Gotaibi has followed for years.
In his artistic quest, as evidenced by all of his works, El Gotaibi questions identity without imposing it, without rhetoric. Through precise actions, he makes his art, like Brechtian theater, a socially and politically engaged act, where aesthetics meet the fact. It is not the artist, but his work that conveys the meaning.
Around the Dry River project (initiated in 2007), El Gotaibi weaves the universe of Visite, populated by oxymorons and dichotomies. This dry river becomes the very allegory of our condition: the trace, the memory of a fertility that once was and is no longer. For El Gotaibi, each project unfolds in several stages, mysterious and changing, taking it to unsuspected ends. This is the case of Dry River, which gave birth to Visite to Okavango, another fascinating river, an inexhaustible source of inspiration.
With Nouvelle Religion (2012), he deepens his reflection on the tensions between archaic forms of belief and contemporary religiosity. By placing football and original sin in dialogue, he reveals the troubling rise of a new collective cult.
In 2014, he presented Ring of Submission at the Institut du Monde Arabe (IMA), a work questioning the dogmas and traditions that govern modern societies. His most recent projects — National Territory (2016), Perspective de brebis (2019), Perspective de séduction (2020), and Lion de l’Atlas (2021) — question social categorizations and the individual’s relationship to technical and political power. In these, he introduces symbolic materials such as wool and concrete, opening the door to new formal experiments.
With Ba Moyi Ya Africa (2019) — literally "The Suns of Africa" —, the artist questions his African identity. First presented at the Young Congo Biennale, this monumental installation deconstructs clichés about a continent to which he belongs without fully recognizing himself: another paradox that only travel can overcome.
To materialize the metaphor of the multiple suns, El Gotaibi installs thirty-three projectors arranged in a circle, emitting blinding light. This powerful light becomes the image of a shining sun, directly referring to the title of the work.
In the same year, he traveled to South Africa for a residency at the Nirox Foundation sculpture park, as part of Visite to Okavango, a pan-African field expedition linking Morocco to Botswana. This collaborative project aims to promote an authentic vision of the continent, far from the prevailing media stereotypes and myths.
During his residency, he created Sun(W)hole (2020), a monumental wall installation 15.3 meters long and 4 meters high, built on a hill. He now presents the process in the form of a photographic triptych documenting the stages of ideation, creation, and in situ installation.
The works brought together in Visite thus form a metaphorical counter-power, placing the viewer's gaze at the crossroads of the aesthetic, poetic, narrative, and political sources of the artist’s thought. They form a coherent, inseparable corpus, inviting us to endlessly re-read the metamorphoses of a land in the making — with its thousand skins, sounds, and colors — a land illuminated by the sun and creative force: the African land.
The exhibition is accompanied by a richly documented monographic publication, including texts from national and international art critics and writers, such as Brahim Oulahyane, Elisa Ganivet, Fatima-Zahra Lakrissa, Juan Asis, among others.
