Fathiya Tahiri and Mahi Binebine
The Human will that emerges from the indistinct
53rd Venice Biennale
Pagan religion as a human need expressed through art
di Claudio Simeoni
53rd Venice Biennale: Pagan religion as a human need expressed through art.
Italian version: Mahi Binebine e Fathiya Tahiri at the 53rd Venice Biennale
The Moroccan pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale presents two artists of great value, Fathiya Tahiri and Mahi Binebine.
These artists deal with the theme of the mass as an indistinct ensemble of individuals, levelled by a society that considers them only shapes without intelligence, will and personality. This sense of flattening is perceived in our times by every culture like an oppression of the emotional structure of people which must be deleted to get a compact ensemble of depersonalizated individuals. Freud wrote about this denial of subjective personality as if it were a need of civilization. The civilization, in order to exist and progress, must feed itself with the denial of the individual and of his/her life tensions and impulses . The civilization must reduce the individual into the mass, placed inside social conventions after being forced to alienate him/herself from life and from growth impulses.
These artists represent very well the objective situation of subjective flattening of individuals, through an ensemble of masks whose faces want to remember an always present past that blocks the way to every future.
Masks that deny the growth.
In one sculpture, the keys in the mouth and the key that blocks the eye and the hands on the face of the masks made by Binebine lock the mask-man to his future.
This idea of massification as an alination from life and acceptance of a dominated social role is frequent in modern art. This art symbolically represents this state of being of men and of societies as an awareness of the man who lives in a world from which he feels separated, locked in his role of mass individual, absolutely indistinct.
This being indistinct is well represented by the column of masks made by Binebine. In this column, the massified ensemble is closed in itself.
Tahiri represents through the metaphore of teeth the need of a massified system to gobble up and destroy every "diversity". The teeth represent the violence with which every social system takes possession of the emotionali impulses of people destroying their personality and intelligence.
Very symbolical and clear is the image of the teeth devouring a woman's body, a body deprived of its head and personality, of intelligence and emotions, that is like a corpse because it's deprived of the expressions through which it used to live in the world. Now this body, deprived of the breath of life, offers itself like a Noemi to her master Berlusconi.
This is what Fathiya Tahiri and Mahi Binebine tell us.
There is a situation that is worth remembering: how many people coming from Morocco underwent attempts of violence and abuses of power in Veneto. In Veneto the word "Moroccan" often means "beggar, pusher, rapist" and not simply "person coming from Morocco". How much violence has been used by venetian people to turn Moroccan people into individuals levelled to the catholic fundamentalist reality in Veneto. In Veneto, the Italian Constitution itself has been violated and insulted in order to homologate people coming from Morocco and Arabian countries, with the help of Authorities who preferred to turn their heads away and avoid seeing the violence. They almost denied the right to pray to muslim people in Veneto as if it were a right of christian fundamentalists to drive a cross in their hearts. Prefects, chiefs of police, magistrates pretended not to see and so became partners in crime.
This is the reason why we can't avoid to see in Binebine's artworks the expression of the violence imposed on citizens from Morocco or from Arabian conutries, that is actually a violence imposed on all the citizens on the Earth!
Emerging from homologation is something sacred and fundamental according to the Polytheistic Pagan Religion, and so are sacred the needs of those Human Beings who, apart from their culture or religion, always have the tension that urges inside them to hold up the sky of knowledge and awareness, apart from the way in which they describe that sky!
Note: the Moroccan pavilion is in the church of Maria della Pietà (Mary of Pity) in Riva degli Schiavoni, Castello 3701 and will be opened until the 22nd November 2009.
Marghera, 11th June 2009
Italian version: Mahi Binebine e Fathiya Tahiri at the 53rd Venice Biennale
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Claudio Simeoni Mechanic Apprentice Sorcerer Keeper of the Antichrist P.le Parmesan 8 30175 Marghera Venice Italy Tel. 3277862784 E-mail: claudiosimeoni@libero.it |
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