Latifa Echakhch

(Moroccan, born 1974)

Latifa Echakhch is a contemporary Morrocan visual artist known for her socio-political and culturally-driven works. Her sculptures, paintings, and installations decontextualize culturally symbolic objects, challenging viewers’ preconceived associations with those items. “I am particularly interested in the exact moment coming after an action or an event, when we have before our eyes some traces which we—as viewers—have to rebuild as a narrative chronology, in order to be able to understand the context, as a kind of detective practice,” she reflected on her work. Echakhch was born in 1974 in El Khnansa, Morocco and moved to France at the age of three. She attended the École supérieure d'Art de Grenoble and graduated from the National School of Arts Cergy-Pontoise and the Lyon National School of Fine Arts, after which she started her art career in 2002. Her work not only makes viewers reconsider their thoughts about cultural objects, but also reflects the fragility of modernism. In her piece Untitled (Gunpowder) she created a black border by throwing gunpowder tea at a wall as a reference to war as well as the popularity of tea in Morocco. Echakhch has had solo exhibitions at institutions including the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, MACBA in Barcelona, Tate Modern in London, and Fondazione Memmo in Rome. She has also participated in the Istanbul Biennial, the 54th Venice Biennale, the 11th Sharjah Biennial, and Manifesta 7 in Bolzano, Italy. In 2013, she was awarded the Marcel Duchamp Prize, and in 2015, she was awarded the Zurich Art Prize and became the first female guest curator of the annual Masters' exhibition at the Haute École d'art et de design Genève. Echakhch currently lives and works in Martigny, Switzerland.