Marrakesh’s Museum of African Contemporary Art Al Maaden reopens, embarking on a new era

After two years of redevelopment, Marrakesh’s Museum of African Contemporary Art Al Maaden reopened this week, with refurbished galleries that celebrate its impressive collection, as well as additional spaces.

Founded by cultural non-profit Fondation Alliances in 2016, the museum is known for holding one of the most comprehensive collections of contemporary African art and acting as a gateway to the continent’s varied art scene.

Now, MACAAL intends to enter a new era by showcasing its collection permanently, with thematic exhibitions periodically rotating the more than 2,000 pieces, including works by Moroccan artists Hassan El Glaoui, Said Afifi and Saad Hassani.

“This is an exciting new chapter in the evolution of MACAAL,” Othman Lazraq, president of the museum and of Fondation Alliances, tells The National. “For almost a decade, the museum has served as a hub fostering global understanding of the continent’s artistic heritage, and these new developments will bring more artists, conversations and stories to the fore.

“Creating accessibility around art is something my family and I care strongly about, and we look forward to sharing works from the collection with local, regional and international visitors.”

A new programme for annual site-specific installations, a media library, an Artist Room for temporary shows and a stunning cafe terrace and garden area with sculptures have also been added.

As the museum has matured, so have its goals. This new era marks a subtle shift of focus over how it supports the regional art scene – a market that is slowly gaining international traction and attention, as narratives around art from the Global South have evolved.

“For the past nine years, we've been really focusing on production, helping artists from Morocco and the continent concretise their projects, because like here in Morocco we don't have many large art centres,” says MACAAL's artistic director Meriem Berrada. “We were having a show every six months, encouraging artists to create large-scale projects, helping with networking and research, but now that we’ve built this ecosystem, we wanted to start showing more of the collection and share this piece of history with the public.

“At the same time, we’ve kept spaces for large-scale commissions, and the programme will have two new works to be chosen every year. It could be any medium or topic, and it's possible we will expand further and have another space at the fountain at the museum entrance,” she adds. “The temporary Artist Room space will have a new showcase every three or six months.”

In the Artist Room, a temporary solo exhibition by Sara Ouhaddou currently looks at traditional crafts that can be used in contemporary art, working alongside local artisans. A Timeline Room has also been unveiled, based on extensive research and key historical events that created major artistic and cultural milestones. A New Media Library (BNM) offers a multimedia archive of sound and performance art by African artists from the 1990s to the present, as well as a new library dedicated to contemporary African art.

The inaugural exhibition for the reopening is titled Seven Contours, One Collection, featuring more than 150 works spanning the African continent from the early 20th century onwards.

Curated by Morad Montazami and Madeleine de Colnet, of Zaman Books & Curating, in collaboration with Berrada, the exhibition is organised into seven themed galleries, exploring topics such as decolonisation, ecology, spirituality and Afro-diasporic movements.

Each room is grounded with video interviews by prominent academics and intellectuals, including theoretician Ariella Aisha Azoulay, whose work focuses on decolonial theory; philosopher Nadia Yala Kisukidi, who rethinks notions of Pan-Africanist utopias; and curator Denetem Touam Bona, who re-examines sacred and ritual knowledge in contemporary settings.

The exhibition presents modern and contemporary artists such as Malick Sidibe, Hassan Hajjaj and Farid Belkahia, alongside the new site-specific works by Salima Naji and Aicha Snoussi.

“The exhibition acts as a map of different issues we're trying to touch upon; different cornerstones of African contemporary art, either economics, politics, poetics or ecologies, to give a non-linear trajectory to this collection, and regional contemporary art in general,” Montazami says. “We’ve tried to create crossovers between the works, artists and histories, identify the seven concepts, in order to tell a bigger, less western-oriented narrative of African contemporary art throughout this particular collection.

“We’re trying to think outside of certain hierarchies that were born out of western museology, including how the West has shown or promoted African art with a rather Orientalist or capitalist strategy,” he adds. “We tried to make it as something that you can feel, from the colours of the work, their textures, to create a more intimate contact between the viewer and the artworks.”

The show includes works from as early as 1910, featuring French Orientalist and Morocco-based artist Jacques Majorelle and the first Congolese African grassroots artist Albert Lubaki, who was provided with art supplies by colonists. It then moves through post-independence pieces from the 1960s and 1970s, before arriving at more recent works by Amina Agueznay, M’Barek Bouhchichi and Farah Al Qasimi.

One of the first works visitors to MACAAL see is Naji’s installation In The Arms of The Earth, an adobe brick vernacular architectural creation that invites them to walk through the arches and hollow dome structures. The commissioned installation is a symbol that ties past and present together, as this old architecture could be the answer to climate change problems plaguing us now and in the future.

Victors are likely to start their museum experience by entering through the artwork and then exit back through it again, completing the cycle.

“I’ve been working on preserving this architecture for over 20 years, because I can’t bear to see it die out,” says Naji. “It has so much potential – people look at mud bricks and see the past, antiquity – but for me, this is the future, it's modernity and life.

“Everyone thought concrete was the material of modernity, but concrete is the material of the colonial era, and it doesn’t last – like we just saw in the Moroccan earthquakes, the traditional architecture survived, and has been surviving for centuries,” she adds. “I worked with artisans to create this and I want visitors to walk through and touch it. It’s something that should be felt by hand, just as it was made by hand.”

More information at macaal.org

• Remittance charges will be tackled by blockchain

• UAE's monumental and risky Mars Mission to inspire future generations, says minister

• Could the UAE drive India's economy?

• News has a bright future and the UAE is at the heart of it

• Architecture is over - here's cybertecture

• The National announces Future of News journalism competition

• Round up: Experts share their visions of the world to come