Painter, sculptor, and print artist Malika Agueznay is a leading figure in Moroccan modern and contemporary art. She studied at the Casablanca Art School between 1966 and 1970, during the golden age and pedagogic revolution led by Farid Belkahia, Mohamed Melehi, and Mohammed Chabâa. Agueznay is one of the rare women artists at the Casablanca Art School during this time and is still active to this day. In 1981, Agueznay, alongside Melehi, Chabâa, and Chaïbia Talal, were invited by the psychiatrist Abdellah Ziou Ziou to organize an artisticcollaborative, on-site programme that included mural paintings and cinema. The programme involved the patients of the Berrechid psychiatric hospital as a way to rehabilitate the role of psychiatry and mentally ill people within Moroccan society. Agueznay collaborated closely with the art historian and anthropologist Toni Maraini for the programme, devoting her time to the women patients of the hospital. Known for her landmark seaweed pattern, Agueznay applies it in her painting and printmaking works (using woodcut relief techniques) that evoke cellular structures growing and proliferating organically in abstract landscapes. This pattern functions either as a polymorphous, all-over visual strategy or is linked to calligraphic text, between botanical arborescence and feminine anthropomorphic evocations. Agueznay’s aquatic or atmospheric compositions—blending oceans, constellations, and suns—can also be seen as a decorative and feminine response to Western kinetic and minimalist art. In this way, Agueznay’s organic abstractions have many points of origin within the same cosmogony or system of signs.     

WORKS IN THE EXHIBITION:

3 flags, reproductions of oil paintings and etching on zinc, each 600 × 450 cm: Le Paradis sous les pas des mères (1996). Courtesy of Mehdia Agueznay; Tiqlit (1991). Courtesy of private collection; La paix, assalam (2012). Courtesy of private collection. Adaptation in Berlin commissioned by Haus der Kulturen der Welt