© Silvia Capellari
Born in Rabat in 1991, Mostafa Saifi Rahmouni lives and works between Brussels and Rabat. He completed his post-master's degree at the HISK (Ghent), after training at the Institut National des Beaux-arts de Tétouan, and at ENSAV-La Cambre (sculpture atelier).
He has exhibited in Berlin (Rosalux), Brussels (Centrale-Lab and BOZAR as part of the Moussem Cities Festival), Beirut (Sharjah Biennial) and at the 63rd Salon de Montrouge. He has participated in numerous exhibitions in Europe. In 2017, he received the prize of the 9th Watch This Space biennial and the prize of the 9th edition of the young sculpture of the Wallonia-Brussels Federation, then in 2019 the Sabam prize of the ArtContest competition. In 2020, he took part in the residency programme of WIELS, an art centre in Brussels. In 2021, he is selected by the Young Artist Fund organised by the Middelheim Museum in Antwerp.
His work is built on different cultural, social and political references, personal stories and the big history. The artist combines serious and tragic subjects, or references to post-colonial issues, with poetry and humour. Using fragments of everyday life, his works reveal the everyday and the morbid as well as the exceptional and the sublime.
In the context of the current health crisis, Moussem looks for other forms of presentation. Thus our offices in the Ravenstein Gallery are transformed into the Moussem Gallery exhibition space. For this second exhibition, the windows of the space invite you to discover the invasive yet discreet presence of the installation No Land's Man.
A palimpsest of white plastic bags fills the room. The most notorious bags - the production of which has even become illegal - have been stripped of their function here. Roaming across continents and oceans, where nobody wants them anymore, they have become the remnants of the economy of the past and - as the title and the current circumstances remind us - they function as subtle metaphors for the many people who wander around. Other subtle memories nestle amidst the plastic mass when a face, a hand and a tuft of hair emerge from the mass, surrounded by an endless mass of waste and emptiness. This landscape is more than an artistic idea; it is an intimate representation of an existing landscape that the artist found on his way. A landscape that bore the marks of human passage - multilingual inscriptions, years of accumulation of waste and human remains. The artist presents them here distilled to their essence, their absence.
No Land's Man marks the beginning of Mostafa's long-term residency at Moussem.
On view continuously and without reservation through the windows during the Ravenstein gallery's opening hours (05:00 > 22:00 Ravenstein Gallery 46).
A Moussem production supported by: de Vlaamse Gemeenschap, VGC, The Brussels-Capital Region
Born in Rabat in 1991, Mostafa Saifi Rahmouni lives and works between Brussels and Rabat. He completed his post-master's degree at the HISK (Ghent), after training at the Institut National des Beaux-arts de Tétouan, and at ENSAV-La Cambre (sculpture atelier).
He has exhibited in Berlin (Rosalux), Brussels (Centrale-Lab and BOZAR as part of the Moussem Cities Festival), Beirut (Sharjah Biennial) and at the 63rd Salon de Montrouge. He has participated in numerous exhibitions in Europe. In 2017, he received the prize of the 9th Watch This Space biennial and the prize of the 9th edition of the young sculpture of the Wallonia-Brussels Federation, then in 2019 the Sabam prize of the ArtContest competition. In 2020, he took part in the residency programme of WIELS, an art centre in Brussels. In 2021, he is selected by the Young Artist Fund organised by the Middelheim Museum in Antwerp.
His work is built on different cultural, social and political references, personal stories and the big history. The artist combines serious and tragic subjects, or references to post-colonial issues, with poetry and humour. Using fragments of everyday life, his works reveal the everyday and the morbid as well as the exceptional and the sublime.
In the context of the current health crisis, Moussem looks for other forms of presentation. Thus our offices in the Ravenstein Gallery are transformed into the Moussem Gallery exhibition space. For this second exhibition, the windows of the space invite you to discover the invasive yet discreet presence of the installation No Land's Man.
A palimpsest of white plastic bags fills the room. The most notorious bags - the production of which has even become illegal - have been stripped of their function here. Roaming across continents and oceans, where nobody wants them anymore, they have become the remnants of the economy of the past and - as the title and the current circumstances remind us - they function as subtle metaphors for the many people who wander around. Other subtle memories nestle amidst the plastic mass when a face, a hand and a tuft of hair emerge from the mass, surrounded by an endless mass of waste and emptiness. This landscape is more than an artistic idea; it is an intimate representation of an existing landscape that the artist found on his way. A landscape that bore the marks of human passage - multilingual inscriptions, years of accumulation of waste and human remains. The artist presents them here distilled to their essence, their absence.
No Land's Man marks the beginning of Mostafa's long-term residency at Moussem.
On view continuously and without reservation through the windows during the Ravenstein gallery's opening hours (05:00 > 22:00 Ravenstein Gallery 46).
