Location: Kula Gallery, Kralja Tomislava 10

Date: August 17 - October 20, 2023

Dalibor Praničević on the artist: "A significant part of Latifa Echakhch's artistic production consists of site-specific works. Through them, she often questions established social frameworks, prevailing opinions, and norms, articulating and challenging them through visually captivating transformations and a frequent notion of material destruction. The process of inversion and 'encounters on the edge' seem to be integral parts of the artistic strategy that Latifa nurtures and persists in. It is especially important to emphasize that numerous questions of identity - national, cultural, gender, and more - are woven within the coordinates of her transformative artistic process. By utilizing the aesthetics of different materials and their configurations, the artist fundamentally alters them through further semantic constructs - and ambiguities - confronting experiences from various geographic, historical, political, social, and other contexts. Building upon the palimpsest of historical experience, to which the late antique space of the 'Kula' gallery belongs, Latifa Echakhch constructs a site-specific installation 'Waves,' resembling a theatrical setting, and opens up a broad platform for discussing what we seemingly see or know. The semantic threads of the constructed environment can be diverse: from surrendering to Romantic scenes of a restless sea surface (or reminiscences of a known artwork from art history) to deciphering the tragedy of the contemporary world through geopolitical clashes and the fate of all those full of hope tragically lost in the Mediterranean Sea."

Artist's biography: Latifa Echakhch was born in 1974 in El Khnansa, Morocco, and lives and works in Martigny, Switzerland. Her sculptures, paintings, and installations poetically incorporate culturally charged objects and concepts to expand the contemplative associations of the observer towards them. Her works have been extensively exhibited in solo exhibitions at institutions including the Center Pompidou in Paris, Musee d'art contemporain de Lyon, Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio, Kunsthaus Zurich, MACBA in Barcelona, Nouveau Musee National de Monaco, Kunsthalle Fridericianum in Kassel, Swiss Institute in New York, Tate Modern in London, Le Magasin in Grenoble, and Fondazione Memmo in Rome. She participated in the Istanbul Biennial, the 54th Venice Biennale, the 11th Sharjah Biennial, and Manifesta 7 in Bolzano, Italy. She was awarded the Marcel Duchamp Prize in 2013 and the Zurich Art Prize in 2015. In 2022, she represented Switzerland at the Venice Biennale.

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