Suspect Language

By Mounir Fatmi

"Suspect Language is an exhibition that gathers a body of recent works by mounir fatmi.
From the entrance, the audience is confronted to the movie projection Sleep Al Naim.
In this video, a virtual image modelized in 3D of the famous English writer of Indian origin, Salman Rushdie is asleep.
Because of his most well known novel the Satanic Verses, censored in all the Arab countries, Salman Rushdie was victim of a fatwa enounced by the Iranian President Khomeini.
Inspired by Andy Warhol’s experimental movie Sleep, the artist chooses the English writer as his main character, to make him sleep, to put him in this state between life and death. This is this in-between state that the artist expresses in this exhibition titled Suspect Language. He takes the censorship as point of departure of a creation, raising a doubt on the Quran’s suraths in the piece In the absence of evidence to the contrary and writing his manifesto on jumping poles like in Obstacles, Coma, Warning.
Mounir Fatmi questions the text and its visual own poetry highlighting a paradox between its beauty and its violence, its meaning and its shape. Using the coaxial antenna cable in the pieces Kissing Circles, he interprets the solution to the Descartes Theorem, being inspired by the poem of Frederick Soddy. How we can come from a mathematics problem to a language, like a poem.
There is another tribute in this exhibition, to the artist Brion Gysin, who lived in Morocco and a key person of the beat generation, and has been widely inspired by the Arabic calligraphy in his whole work. The piece Calligraphy of Fire, shows once again the beauty of calligraphy associating the shape to the shape of fire. It relates to a text that burns, that could be censored, it also could refer to a symbolic sense of purification.
The serie of photographs The Game, is an excerpt from the movie L’Enfant Sauvage by Truffaut. It shows the learning to a wild child the language by the game and the food. Not only it is this a reference to early anthropological ideas about otherness and the way the “savage” mind understands words and graphic representations, it is also a metaphor for France's interest in the “other” during the Imperial era. The doctor's incessant note-taking represents attempts to control and the implicit violence suggests the violence of imposed authorities. Again language plays a crucial role in trying to unify doctor and subject, or colonisers and colonised.
To finish the exhibition, the viewer faces the video Modern Times, here circular calligraphies are suspended, reminiscent of a system of cogs or a gear mechanism. The title of the piece Modern Times is inspired by Charlie Chaplin's celebrated 1936 film, in which Chaplin plays a lowly worker on a factory production line. The modernity of the factory's machines are visually characterised by a series of whirring cogs. The curves and arabesques of the calligraphy eclipse the meaning of the words, as if the message were disappearing into the engine of the machine. The words are reanimated in a purely visual way as circular abstract forms, reflecting the circular motion of the animation."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mounir Fatmi
• Release date: Nov 3, 2021

Mounir Fatmi

mounir fatmi is a visual artist born in Tangier, Morocco in 1970. He constructs visual spaces and linguistic games. His work deals with the desecration of religious objects, deconstruction, and the end of dogmas and ideologies. He questions the world and plays with its codes and precepts under the prism of architecture, language and the machine. He is particularly interested in the idea of the role of the artist in a society in crisis. mounir fatmi's work offers a look at the world from a different glance, refusing to be blinded by convention. He brings to light our doubts, fears and desires.He has published several books and art catalogs including: The Kissing Precise, with Régis Durand, La Muette edition, Brussels, 2013, Suspect Language, with Lillian Davies, Skira edition, Italy, 2012, This is not blasphemy, in collaboration with Ariel Kyrou, Inculte-Dernier Marge & Actes Sud edition, 2015, History is not Mine, SF Publishing, Paris, 2015, and Survival Signs, SF Publishing, Paris, 2017. He has also participated in the collective book, Letter to a young Moroccan, edition Seuil, Paris, 2009.He has participated in several solo and collective exhibitions in museums and galleries around the world including: Mamco, Geneva, The Picasso Museum, Vallauris, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, The Brooklyn Museum, New York, N.B.K., Berlin, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, MAXXI, Rome, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Museum on the Seam, Jerusalem, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Moscow, Mathaf Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, the Hayward Gallery, London, the Art Gallery of Western Australia, the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, and the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven.His installations have been selected in biennials such as the 52nd and the 57th Venice Biennial, the 8th biennial of Sharjah, the 5th Dakar Biennial, the 2nd Seville Biennial, the 5th Gwangju Biennial and the 10th Lyon Biennial, the 5th Auckland Triennial, Fotofest 2014, Houston, the 10th and 11th Bamako Encounters, as well as the 7th Biennale of Architecture in Shenzhen.mounir fatmi was awarded several prizes such as the Cairo Biennial Prize in 2010, the Uriöt prize, Amsterdam, the Grand Prize Leopold Sedar Senghor of the 7th Dakar Biennial in 2006 as well and he was shortlisted for the Jameel Prize of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London in 2013.

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Suspect Language is an exhibition of recent work by mounir fatmi.

Upon entering the gallery, the audience is confronted with the movie projection Sleep Al Naim, in which a virtual, 3D image of the famous English writer of Indian origin, Salman Rushdie, is asleep.

Because of his well-known novel the Satanic Verses, 1988 censored in all the Arab countries, Salman Rushdie was victim of a fatwa declared by the Iranian President Khomeini in 1989.

Inspired by Andy Warhol’s experimental movie Sleep, the artist chose the English writer as his main character, showing him asleep, as if in a state between life and death. This is the in-between state that the artist seeks to convey in this exhibition titled Suspect Language. Fatmi uses censorship as point of departure, raising a doubt in the Quran’s suraths (phrases) in the piece, In the Absence of Evidence to the Contrary and writing his manifesto on the horse jumping poles as in Obstacles, Coma, Warning.

Mounir Fatmi questions the text and its visual poetry highlighting a paradox between its beauty and its violence, its meaning and its shape. Using the coaxial antenna cable in the pieces Kissing Circles, he interprets the solution to the Descartes Theorem, being inspired by the poem of Frederick Soddy. How we can come from a mathematics problem to a language, like a poem.

There is another tribute in this exhibition, to the artist Brion Gysin, who lived in Morocco and a key person of the beat generation, who was widely inspired by the Arabic calligraphy in his whole work. The piece Calligraphy of Fire shows once again the beauty of calligraphy associating the shape to the shape of fire. It relates to a text that burns, that could be censored, it also could refer to a symbolic sense of purification.

The series of photographs The Game, is an excerpt from the movie L’Enfant Sauvage by Truffaut. It shows the education of a wild child the language by the game and the food. Not only it is this a reference to early anthropological ideas about otherness and the way the savage mind understands words and graphic representations, it is also a metaphor for France's interest in the other during the Imperial