Blinding light at Casa Árabe

Truly original is the artistic and exhibition project made up of works by the Moroccan artist Mounir Fatmi (Tangiers, 1970), which is on display at Casa Árabe in Madrid until the end of this summer. The various pieces that make up The Blinding Light were inspired by a miraculous scene painted by Fra Angelico: the Altarpiece of Saint Mark (1440). The lower part of the predella shows the miracles performed by two saints, Cosmas and Damian, born in Syria, converted to Christianity in their youth, and recognised by him as patrons of surgeons and pharmacists.

The miracle chosen by Mounir Fatmi is The Healing of Deacon Justinian. In this scene, the Arab brothers perform the miracle of the deacon's healing by grafting onto him the leg of an Ethiopian man who had died shortly before. It is a scene that evokes the mixing of a white body with a black limb, but also of the living with the dead, thus questioning notions of race, hybridity and identity.

To contemplate the result now on display at Casa Árabe, Mounir Fatmi has made hundreds of photomontages over the course of his career, with several images showing an operating theatre - with its corresponding technological equipment and hygiene measures - superimposed on this miraculous scene. The medical personnel are thus integrated together with the two saints to form a single working group. The result is that, in this way, ghosts and living people are present in another form of reality, a fantasy temporality, as miraculous as the biblical scene itself. 

The ensemble of these works leads us to the association between the Renaissance and hypermodernity through hybridisation. It forms a temporal ellipsis that superimposes different times and spaces, and brings technology and anaesthetics closer to a world that in Fra Angelico's own time used to be governed by divine miracles. 

The temporal superimposition, as posed by the Moroccan artist, gives rise to the idea that a religious miracle is feasible today. For the viewer, it is an unexpected combination of spheres of belief that are not infrequently seen as discrepant, if not antagonistic. On the one hand, science, order, reason, concreteness; on the other, religion and the universe of faith, the miraculous and the sacred.

Mounir Fatmi thus achieves a symbiosis as original as it is surprising, in which he reflects his childhood and youth experiences in Tangiers and Casablanca, as well as his time at the Academy of Arts in Rome and the Rijksacademie in Amsterdam.

His childhood experiences in the street market of Casabarata, one of the poorest neighbourhoods in Tangier, are used in his use of materials such as antenna cables, typewriters and VHS tapes to create an experimental archaeology that questions the world and the role of the artist in a society in crisis.

Mounir Fatmi's artistic research is ultimately a reflection on the history of technology and its influence on popular culture, and can be seen as future archives in the making, representing key moments in our contemporary history. These technical materials also question the transmission of knowledge and the suggestive power of images, and critique the mechanisms that link technology to ideologies.   

With this exhibition, part of PhotoEspaña 2022, Mounir Fatmi adds another milestone to his long list of exhibitions in which he has participated: from the Biennials of Venice, Sharjah, Seville, Gwangju, Lyon and Dakar, to his solo exhibitions in Zurich, Geneva, Istanbul, Dusseldorf, Brooklyn and Paris, and the numerous awards he has received, including the Uriöt in Amsterdam, the Leopold Sédar Senghor and the Cairo Biennial.