Mohamed Arejdal
Arc en ciel
2022

About the Item

About the work In Marrakesh, where he has been living and working for several years now, the artist regularly goes to the bazaars - occupations that have disappeared with mass tourism and that Mohamed Arejdald refers to as the cemeteries of history - to hunt for objects that carry traces and memories of nomadic life, in order to use them in his work. In the 'Arcs-en-ciel' series, this is the case with the wooden hoop that connects and supports necklaces made from balls of wool. Known as the alhammar, this hoop is an essential part of the nomadic tent's framework, usually made of untreated cedar and sometimes covered with metal reinforcing plates. A key element and the backbone of the tent, it will also be the backbone of Arejdal's work. But while the tent cuts through space by defining an interior and an exterior, fulfilling its practical function as a shelter that protects nomads from the sun, the cold and the elements, the contemporary artist's works, although made of the same materials as the tent - wool and wood - clearly offer no possibility of shelter. They are reduced to a few nets made of strange strings of beads, incapable of sheltering anything. In Mohamed Arejdal's works, the process of losing the nomadic tents is accelerated daily, and is transformed into woollen beads threaded through galvanised iron wire and attached to a wooden hoop that looks like a drifting boat. These works condense nomadic life and experience. Territories and memories, traces and writings, displacements and movements, encounters and separations, friendships and loves, marriages and divorces, deaths and births... all this is symbolically recorded in the threads whose intertwining forms balls of wool in constellations. According to the artist, the different sizes of these balls express the family and the different ages of the individuals who make it up, and the ties that bind them together and with other populations. But these pellets also, in a way, speak of the disappearance of the raw material for our clothes, as more and more of them are being manufactured to sell as necklaces to tourists.

Creator:

Mohamed Arejdal (1984, Moroccan)

Creation Year:

2022

Dimensions:

Height: 76.38 in (194 cm)Width: 81.11 in (206 cm)Depth: 14.18 in (36 cm)

More Editions & Sizes:

Edition of onePrice: $19,500

Medium:

Copper,Wool,Iron,Wood

Movement & Style:

Contemporary