page_title: Mounir Fatmi
section_title: 1996-2000
hierarchical_section_title: Mounir Fatmi / Biography / Professional career / 1996-2000
caption_attribution_description: English: Dakar Biennale 2000. Goddy Leye, Sandrine Dole and Mounir Fatmi. Photo by Iolanda Pensa.
context_page_description: Mounir Fatmi is a Moroccan artist who lives and works in Paris. He studied at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. His multimedia practice encompasses video, installation, drawing, painting and sculpture. He works on obsolete materials and their uncertain futures, he criticizes the illusory mechanisms that bind humanity to technology, ideologies and their influences in a society in crisis.
  In 2006, he won the Uriöt prize, Amsterdam, the grand prize of the Dakar Biennial and the Cairo Biennial Award in 2010.
context_section_description: In 1996, he left his position as artistic director in advertising and he multiplies his artistic projects. He begins the series of paintings No Witness and Obliteration Memorizing. Spectators are invited to contemplate the works done before they are covered with several layers of white paint. The performance establishes a clear line of separation between "Those who have seen" and "Those who have not seen" the works before their erasure. The witnesses of the paintings are finally photographed and their portraits are placed alongside the works stamped Painted, Seen, Erased. A year later, he realizes the Coma performance, during which canvases were shown to witnesses before being wrapped and packed in clear plastic covers. In the meantime, he finishes the video Arabesque, a tribute to Jackson Pollock, and he wins the Audience Award at the 4th Casablanca Video Art Festival.
  He starts traveling all over Europe, winning prizes and special mentions for his videos. In 1998, he wins the Special Mention of the 3rd International New Film Festival in Split in Croatia, the Prize for the best video creation at the International Video Festival in the Canary Islands and the special Jury Prize at the 16th Video Art Festival, in Estavar-Llivia in Spain for the video Survival signs.
  In 1999 he meets the curator Jean-Louis Froment and takes part in the exhibition "L'objet désorienté" at the Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris, where he made the sculpture Connections, tribute to Jackson Pollock using over five hundred meters of antenna cables on walls and floors.
  In 2000 he receives two fellowships and residency in France and He participates in several exhibitions in Europe and in the United States: Art Video TV Biennal in Bologna, Italy, MAMAC Auditorium, in Nice, France and Society for Cinema Studies, in Chicago, USA. He is invited by Tarik el Haik and Edith Cramer at the University of California at Berkeley California and at the San Francisco Pacific Film Archive for the projection of his videos grouped under the title Rehearsing Arab Identity. He is selected at the 5th Dakar Biennale, where he meets the curator Simon Njami.
caption: Fatmi at Dakar Biennale in 2000 (with Goddy Leye and Sandrine Dole [it])
exif: {}