Ikram Kabbaj
Born in 1960 in Casablanca. Lives in Casablanca and works in Berrechid.
Osmosis
Alabama Cremino marble, carved in Grinnell, September 2007
Commissioned for the Grinnell College Art Collection

Osmosis contains within it the still unrealized dream in which the West and East flow in and through each other, mutually absorbing each other’s ideas, feelings and attitudes. I am happy that this dream, my dream of the future, has started to come to life in Grinnell.

Hicham Benohoud
Born in 1968 in Marrakech. Lives and works in Paris.
La Salle de Classe, 1994-2003
Gelatin silver prints
Courtesy VU Galerie, Paris

Hicham Benohoud considers himself more of a sculptor than a photographer. For La Salle de Classe he drew sketches of his ideas. He then instructed his Marrakech junior-high school students to act them out while the rest of the class sat naturally in the background as if the subject were not there. The results are captured in these photographs. In the process, the students had to find a new relationship to their instructor, who was also the artist. As teacher, Benohoud used his authority to direct his students, yet at the same time his art destabilizes the traditional student-teacher relationship.

Mounir Fatmi
Born in 1970 in Tangiers. Lives and works in Paris and Tangiers.
Out of History, 2007
Video, photographs, typewriter, copies of declassified FBI documents
© Mounir Fatmi and Huey P. Newton Foundation, Oakland. Courtesy La B.A.N.K, Paris

In this installation, filmmaker Mounir Fatmi asks the question: What happens to an icon when divorced from the moment of history that made him that icon?
The icon in Out of History is David Hilliard, a founding member and Chief of Staff of the Black Panther Party in the 1960s. In their day, the Black Panthers represented for revolutionaries around the world the ideal of contesting an established power system. Fatmi is not as interested in the history of the movement as he is in uncovering what Black Panther revolutionaries have become forty years later. In Fatmi's video, David Hilliard has aged but remains tied to his place in American history.
Mounir Fatmi constructs visual spaces that aim to free the viewers from their preconceptions of politics and religion, and allows them to contemplate the subject in new ways. Here, a room is papered on the outside with documents, many censored, collected from the U.S. Government through the Freedom of Information Act. Photographs from the 60s, provided by the Huey P. Newton Foundation in Oakland, California provide further context. He then takes Hilliard 'out of history' inside the installation space.

Safâa Erruas
Born in 1976 in Tétouan. Lives and works in Tétouan.
Untitled, 2007 Photographs printed on ceramic, wire

Safâa Erruas "paints" predominately with the color white, which she believes symbolizes absence, immateriality, transparency, fragility, and the state of endless possibility.

Mohamed El baz
Born in 1967 in El Ksiba, Morocco. Lives and works in Lille, France.
Second Life in City Light, 2007 From ongoing series Bricoler L'Incurable (Tinkering with the Incurable) Photographs and neon

Photographer Mohamed El baz creates indefinable, unique, startling, fun-loving, often cruel and sometimes tender work which responds to daily headlines. "Tinkering with the Incurable" is taken from Romanian philosopher Cioran's book, Syllogismes de l'amerture: "To be modern is to tinker in the incurable".

Hassan Darsi
Born in 1961 in Casablanca. Lives and works in Casablanca.
Central Park, Grinnell, Iowa, September 2007
Digital photographs printed on aluminum Photographed in Central Park, Grinnell, Iowa September 20 & 22, 2007 Doris Shoup of the Family Portraits project, 2001-2007

Hassan Darsi began working in 2001 on a project he called Family Portraits. When he began the series he was not looking to produce a photographic work. It was rather the renewed encounter of the artist with families in the photographic-like studio he created in the neighborhoods throughout the world that was his subject. The props remained more or less the same in Souk Had Oulad Fraj (Morocco), Casablanca (Morocco), Schiedam (Holland), Bordeaux (France), and Grinnell, (United States). The subjects and environments changed around the props,making new encounters and thus new art at each place. In some cases, even the props changed. One day, in hurrying to leave at 3 o'clock in the morning (which is the time one has to get up in order to get a place in the souk), Darsi forgot the bouquet. The artist assumed the missing element into his plan. He detached himself from the prop that had been an element in his series and took advantage of the chance happening to allow a new work to be born.

Abdelali Dahrouch
Born in 1964 in Tangier. Lives and works in Los Angeles.
Homo Sacer, 2007 Video installation

Torture inflicts bodily pain that is itself language-destroying, but torture also mimes (objectifies in the external environment) this language-destroying capacity in its interrogation, the purpose of which is not to elicit needed information but visibly to deconstruct the prisoner's voice.

Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain, 1985.
Homo Sacer is about pain, torture and spirituality. In particular, it focuses on torture by water and its effects on the "enemy combatant" on whom the torture is inflicted.

The Romans called a person banned and excluded from all civil rights "homo sacer," Latin for "sacred man." Under Roman law, he could be killed by anybody. In our contemporary situation, someone labeled an enemy combatant is the equivalent of a homo sacer. He is the object of torture and is ripped from the political and social fabric of civil society and becomes invisible. Removed from the incriminating gaze of justice and community, the individual disappears into a black site where, although biologically alive, he is legally dead. Because he is beyond the purview of nation, citizenry and habeas corpus, the state may torture and dispose of the body at its discretion without being held accountable by national and international law.

Many forms of torture, currently termed "enhanced interrogation techniques" by the Bush Administration, continue to be practiced around the world today. In some methods, the body, which consists of 70% water, is subjected to torture by its own source. Water molecules are made to push the body to its limits, toward extreme pain, with the sensation of drowning repeated until confession or death. The tortured man gasps for air through a suffocation device (often a hood or cloth) and experiences mortal terror.

The body of water used by Dahrouch in Homo Sacer is taken from the Yogananda Paramahansa Meditation Garden, "Lake Shrine," in Los Angeles, California. At the garden, water symbolizes cleansing, purification, and interconnectedness. In Homo Sacer, this water embodies the sacredness of life and humanity, engendering the space of unitive consciousness beyond the watery degradation of postcolonial trauma.

Curators for the Moroccan installation were Kay Wilson, Curator of the Collection, Faulconer Gallery, and Aziz Daki, Professor of Art hHstory and Journalism at the University of El Jadida. Exhibition Designer: Grinnell graduate Milton Severe.