Artist Name: Hamza Halloubi
Residency Dates: August – November 2024
Born: 1982
Hometown: Tangier, Morocco
Lives & Works: Brussels, Belgium
URL: hamzahalloubi.com
Gallery: Tegenboschvanvreden Gallery (Amsterdam)
Education:
2017 | Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten
2014 | HISK Higher Institute for Fine Arts, Ghent
2010 | Master’s degree in visual art at La Cambre (ENSAV), Brussels
Bio:
Hamza El Halloubi uses a variety of mediums such as video, painting, text, voice and installation, conceiving his work as “writing back” to Western Modernist narratives. In his work, Halloubi insists on the place to carry out his artistic approach with the aim of moving the periphery to the center and shifting the relationship between the local and the global, the north, and the south.
Statement:
“My work uses figures of intellectuals such as Saïd, Fanon, Benjamin or Genet whom I make characters in my films. I also emphasize the importance in the history and culture of the places from which we speak, as in my video work “Un après-midi à Larache” around the tomb of Jean Genet in Larache in Morocco, where I question «the places of culture». I believe there is a hierarchy of places and there are places that deserve more attention than others. I’m interested in those minor, forgotten events functioning on the fringes of historical accounts, considered non-representative of major currents.
Most of my videos are very short, like lightning bolts. These are images that need words not to support them but on the contrary to let them flow. These are images that stutter, which demonstrate what they are made of at the very moment of their appearance.
In most of my video installations, I challenge the spectator who is not only a number or an abstraction (like in the cinema, by the way) but it is a specific identity with a name, a sex, a class. It is when this person with a specific identity enters the space of the exhibition, that the video comes alive and activates. In front of my work the spectator does not have this comfort to see without being seen. We are addressed personally, we are a visible body questioned in the public.
In my exhibitions, I try to create a confrontation with the viewer. Against this bourgeois idea of the exhibition, where the works are there to receive us and where the spectator walks around tasting while passing from one room to another. In my exhibitions there is a kind of blocking wall (eyes that look at you and the word that speaks to you) you have to cross it or clear it.”
Support: Hamza Halloubi’s residency is made possible with support from the Flanders State of the Art.
