Latifa Echakhch's Atemporal Zones of Memory Come to London and Venice
The economy of her formal language is evident in the repeated materials, symbols, and techniques that recur throughout her practice, deployed as poetic signifiers with the power to traverse identity and time.
The function of objects as vehicles of transpersonal memory was perhaps most palpable in L'air du temps, Echakhch's solo exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris (8 October 2014–26 January 2015), in which she assembled a variety of objects dipped in Indian ink among a series of stage-like cutouts of clouds suspended from the ceiling, hanging low to the ground.
The objects, which included a suitcase, boxes of records, and a perfume bottle filled with ink, drew from an explicitly personal source—Echakhch's early migration from Morocco to France at the age of three in 1977—but carry an indubitably collective resonance.
The potential of everyday objects to carry associations that speak deeply to individual experience while transcending the personal is at the heart of Echakhch's practice. Her symbolic language delineates a kind of poetics of history, visualising an atemporal zone of memory and collective experience. Read More...
