Yassine Balbzioui works across painting, performance, tapestries, and installation. Educated at the Casablanca Art School in Morocco in the 1990s, his practice is rooted in the interest in social reality, art in public spaces, and local histories. It was in Bordeaux, while Balbzioui was continuing conceptual art studies, that he encountered former Tirailleurs and engaged with their life testimonies and ongoing claims for recognition and reparation, which became formative to his practice. Balbzioui’s characteristic large outdoor murals convey stories of emancipation through painterly strategies. The artist’s vigorous brushwork, shaped by his performative practice, creates an expressive figuration, while the compositional structure evokes theatrical settings. A recurring motif in his paintings is the mask, a strategy of opacity that conceals identities and psychological states, thus encouraging viewers to interpret the characters and to engage with the symbols. For the exhibition, Balbzioui has created a large mural on the balustrade of the HKW facade, welcoming visitors and passers-by to engage with personal and collective memory through the life paths of the Tirailleurs. Rather than illustrating a meaning, Balbzioui’s murals function as a proposition, an openness that transfigures through a collective experience.

Commissioned by Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), co-produced by Yassine Balbzioui and HKW, 2026

Werk in der Ausstellung: Golden Tree for Fake Hope (2026), paint on canvas, 60 m. Courtesy of the artist