Mohssin Harraki has developed a body of work on the border between image and apparatus, drawing inspiration both from antiquity (astronomical treatises and other scientific works from the Arab world) and from highly contemporary debates about education, history and politics. Constellations, maps, equations and even family trees are structuring patterns in his scholarly and, at times, ironic language, using diagonal shapes to contest the official systems of writing.
As Morad Montazami perfectly puts it: “He contrasts prescriptive horoscopes with the tentacles of the astronomical almanac, and fixed nomenclature with the power of the rhizome. His installations often consist of an interplay of volumes, tensions and fragmentations, collections of clues and strategies for vision. The deepest layers of his thinking rise to the surface in a poetics of drift, whatever material form they may take – whether bread or concrete, repetition or the figure of infinity.”
Mohssin Harraki (born in 1981 in Asilah, Morocco) lives and works between Morocco and Paris.
His work has recently been exhibited at Beirut Art Center (Beirut, 2019), MACAAL Musée d’Art Contemporain Africain Al Maaden (Marrakech, 2019), Bard College (Annandale-On-Hudson, 2017), Fondation Nationale des Musées (Rabat, 2016), Dakar Biennale (2018) and Marrakech Biennale (2016).
His first solo exhibition at Imane Farès, in duet with Joseph Kosuth, took place in 2013.