1-54 Art Fair Returns to Marrakech with International Following
This year's edition—featuring 21 galleries from all over the world—takes place at the storied La Mamounia
The Marrakech edition of the 1-54 art fair is an excellent example of size not being everything. This year, just 21 galleries are taking part. But they come from all over—Montreal, Tokyo, and London, as well as Ghana, Cote d’Ivoire, Nigeria, and South Africa—and between them take the temperature of new work by contemporary African artists.
“The mission is to show artists from the continent or the African diaspora,” Touria El Glaoui, the fair’s founding director, tells Galerie from the elegant foyer of La Mamounia, the storied hotel built in 1923, where the fair takes place. The location was also an early favorite of Winston Churchill, and then the whole of Hollywood, although it more recently gained notoriety for Anna Delvey’s misadventures in freeloading.
“But although 1-54 is about selling art, it has a much bigger cultural impact in the city,” continues El Glaoui. Apart from collateral events, with galleries in the art district of Gueliz staging special exhibitions, the reception among locals is immense. On day one, a huge crowd surged at the entrance. “People are really keen to be part of it all,” says El Glaoui. “We try to operate a one-in, one-out policy, but they manage to slip in the back. And anyway, we’re just thrilled that it’s so democratic and that young Moroccans feel this is part of their world.”
1-54 is named for the number of countries in the African continent, and was launched in London by El Glaoui in 2013. A New York edition soon followed. The Marrakech event is now in its seventh year, and also has international clout. “The local market on the continent isn’t that strong, so we needed to choose a location that would attract collectors from abroad,” says El Glaoui. A city of stunning pink buildings, scented orange groves, and steeped in history and traditional craft, Marrakech is certainly that. “The Fondation Beyeler in Basel has brought its patrons; a team of eight curators is here from MoMA in New York; and there’s a big delegation from Atlanta,” she says. If that sounds unexpected, it’s down to Dr. Fahama Pecou, the founding director of the African Diaspora Art Museum in Atlanta, who is hoping to continue the U.S.-Moroccan cultural exchange when the World Cup arrives in America in June. “Even the Mayor of Atlanta has come,” says El Glaoui.
The gallerists seem keen to dispel the clichés of “Africanism” in their choices, and the range of artists is eye-opening. At MCC gallery, a local outfit, the artist Malika Sqalli explains her three-dimensional tapestries. Half-Austrian, half-Moroccan, Sqalli has inserted photographic panels to demonstrate her dual heritage through imagery of the Atlas mountains fused with Austrian flora, while her passion for sky-diving is manifest in sections of shredded parachute silk. “It’s all about an inquisition of the body, and the self,” says Sqalli of both her sport and her art, before describing her one near-death moment. “One out of over 100 dives,” she says with pride.
Next door at So Art, a gallery based in the Moroccan city of Casablanca, is artist Nadia Karam, who goes by the male anagram of Aidan Marak. “When you’re a woman in Morocco, all they want to know is, who is your father, what is your family,” says Karam, who nows lives in Miami, following ten years in New York. “I trained in design in Paris, and worked in Manhattan for Alexandra Champalimaud,” she explains, standing before a stunning canvas, papered with stories from French and American newspapers and painted over in vivid red and yellow. There are blocks of type telling personal stories and inscriptions in Arabic. “It’s raw and layered and intentionally imperfect,” says Karam, whose work is in the collection of the Bank of Morocco and favored by unnamed, art-collecting basketball players in the U.S.
Prices here are entry-level low. Karam’s is around $16,000. On the same stand, beautifully executed works of newsprint squares sewn together with cream or black thread by 36-year-old Ange Dakouo are just $7,000-$9,000. Dakouo trained and lives in Bamako, Mali, and his meticulous pieces speak of collective memory and the spiritual importance of repetitive making.
“It was my artist, Stanley Wany, who specifically asked me to show at this fair,” says Christine Redfern, founder of Montreal gallery Ellephant. She has devoted her booth to a four-panel artwork by Wany—unstretched canvases that he has worked on for a year or more, layering the paint, ink, and spectral dancing figures to reconnect with his Haitian and Congolese heritage. Wany has received prizes for his graphic novels, and the sense of narrative prevails in his paintings.
At the next stand, Space Un is the first gallery in Tokyo to represent African artists. “In fact, the first gallery in Asia,” says founder Yuta Nakano. “We opened two years ago, and it’s a process of introduction and explanation, though I think there is a link in the proximity of fine art to craft, which we also find in Japan, and ideas of animism.”
This year, Nakano invited the well-known Cameroonian artist Barthélémy Toguo to a residency in Yoshino, outside of Tokyo, and the results are here. A Japanese weaver has created a tapestry from one of Toguo’s paintings, and Toguo himself decorated a series of plates and bowls made by a Japanese ceramist, in the spirit of Afro-Japanese fusion. Also on show at Space Un are fabulously rippling and energetic canvases thick with heat-treated acrylic by 26-year-old Dzidefo Amegatsey, who is based in Ghana. As a reference to his father, a house painter, they perhaps follow in the footsteps of Galerie Creative Mind Theaster Gates, whose tarpaulin works do much the same thing, and almost definitely unwittingly.
“I think the range of work speaks for itself,” says El Glauoi, as we walk into the fair and past the first booth of Ghanaian gallery 1957, where the luminous candy-colored abstractions of Freya Tewelde speak of faraway dreams and distant ancestors. “We tried to expand into a space nearby for the last couple of years, but everyone wanted to be at the Mamounia, and even at this scale, we seem to have covered a number of possibilities.” Surely even the mayor of Atlanta will feel the vibe.
1-54 is at La Mamounia, Marrakech, until 8 February.