Cultural Foundation & Warehouse 421

Mohammed Chabaa: Visual Consciousness

Mohammed Chabaa: Visual Consciousness presents the life’s work of Mohammed Chabaa (1935–2013), a pioneer of Moroccan contemporary art and Global South modernity. As the first posthumous retrospective exhibition for the artist outside of Morocco, Visual Consciousness brings together paintings, sculptures, graphic art, interior design models and archival material, encompassing his creative journey from 1957 to 2012.

“As We Gaze Upon Her”

The exhibition attempts to expand the notion of ‘woman’, often constrained by social, cultural, and existential insecurities. Woman’ and its various forms are subjective—, an idea and a body. It is malleable, imagined and exploitable, existing in a liminal space, fluctuating between challenging and perpetuating social hegemonies. A subjugated vessel, ‘woman’ is a carrier of social norms of objectified bodies, codes of family honour,  gendered duties that dominate public and private

“So Different, So Appealing”, Curated by Murtaza Vali

So Different, So Appealing examines the aesthetics, rhetorics, and rituals of the real estate industry, unpacking the strategies through which it conjures up its many seductions, aspirations, and desires. The included works use humor, parody, appropriation, and mimesis, uncovering the perverse logic of marketing speak by highlighting its banality or pushing it to the point of absurdity. Neoliberal real estate is, by definition, transnational, and works in So Different, So Appealing also track its offshore networks. As tools for attracting foreign investment, high end real estate developments frequently market themselves abroad, projecting their aspirational projections across and beyond borders. And migrant workers remit these emergent aesthetics and aspirations alongside their hard-earned wages, displacing the hegemony of older local architectural styles back home.