Encountering African Art Afresh

Franklin Nelson

‘Before Marrakesh everything was black. This city taught me colour’, observed the French fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent, whose vivid blue home in the city is now a popular tourist attraction. When I visited what is widely considered Morocco’s creative hub during a grey January in the north-western hemisphere, I encountered sights and shades of all kinds. That sense of newness and energy was underscored by the re-opening on 2 February 2025 of a museum that casts modern and contemporary African art in a bold, empowering light and deserves many visitors itself. 

The Museum of Contemporary Art Al-Maaden (Macaal) was set up in 2016 by Fondation Alliances, a non-profit association supported by Morocco’s leading real-estate company, in a push to ‘democratise art and culture’ and ‘give back to Marrakesh’, says its president Othman Lazraq. After a series of temporary exhibitions, Macaal’s permanent collection, which is owned by the Lazraq family, now has a dedicated home organised according to seven ‘contours’. The ‘attitudes or strategies that unfold across […] rooms, focusing on the key poetic, political, and technical concerns of contemporary African practices’, as the museum puts it, are ‘Decolonize’, ‘Cohabit’, ‘Transcribe’, ‘Initiate’, ‘Promise’, ‘Converge’ and ‘Weave’. These headings are the starting points for a compelling journey through Moroccan, Maghrebi, sub-Saharan African and African diasporic drawing, painting, photography, video, sculpture and installation, whose force was compounded for me precisely because it did not feel didactic, condescending or rushed. 

Salima Naji’s Dans les bras de la terre (‘In the Arms of the Earth’) is the biggest work on display and the first that visitors to the museum encounter. It was designed in line with the traditions of earthen architecture, the title conveying its attempt to welcome us in. Challenging the ‘colonial unconscious’ of concrete architecture, according to co-curator Morad Montazami, and pointing to the need for more sustainable construction practices in the light of climate change, the temporary installation leads to smaller but no less powerful works by an impressive range of artists. Highlights for me included Casablanca-born Said Afifi’s Géomorphologie d’un exo-paysage – relevé 6 (2021, ‘Geomorphology of an exo-landscape – survey 6) which presents a vast mountainscape borne of reworked online images, stunning in its rich shades of brown and blue, and Kinshasa-born Chéri Chérin’s futuristic-cum-surrealistic take on how the Western world is not everything that it is cracked up to be in La fuite des cerveaux (2004, Brain drain). Upstairs ‘Promise’, the sole room whose title operates both as a noun and a verb, is especially inviting, reminding visitors of the artistic heritage that underlies Marrakesh and all that may come out of the city in future. And, in an adjoining room, underscoring how Macaal is, in effect, piecing together a ‘forgotten’ history of art is a timeline that snakes around the walls in a circle. Starting with Egypt’s independence in 1922 and ending with the new museum, the timeline details the participation of African and Afro-descendent artists in exhibitions at home and abroad and major moments in diasporic history. Admittedly, the black-and-white timeline is not at all colourful. But it is perhaps the clearest evidence of the museum’s commitment to its keyword, ‘transmission’.  

Macaal’s reopening coincided with the Marrakesh edition of 1-54, the international contemporary African art fair that is also held in London, New York and Hong Kong. The name 1-54 nods to the cultural richness of one continent comprised of fifty-four countries. I visited the fair, which took place between 30 January and 2 February 2025, at the two venues across which it was hosted on the other side of town: the grand La Mamounia Hotel and Dada, a multidisciplinary space overlooking the historic Jemaa el Fna Square. It featured more than 30 galleries and art collectives and drew curators and collectors from around the world. Although the fair opened to the announcement that Britain’s Tate galleries had purchased Blank stare, a portrait by the Ghanaian figurative artist Amoako Boafo, other work left more of an impression on me. Influenced by Amazigh culture, Bouchra Boudoua mixes clay in different shapes and textures with bursts of blue, red and yellow to make for alluringly abstract works. Elsewhere, people were decidedly in focus, as in the photographs of Girma Berta, in which men in Bamako, Marrakesh and his birth city of Addis Ababa sit in sharp focus on motorbikes against backdrops that finely blend shades of brown, green and blue in the earth, land and sky. 

The individual work on show that most struck me, Willem Evans’s Tiraillés (‘Torn apart’) spotlights so-called Senegalese tirailleurs (they in fact hailed from many more countries) who fought for France in the First and Second World Wars but have never been recognised for their sacrifice. Black-and-white digital images overlaid on small wooden blocks form a large collage of memories of imperialism and violence; many of the men carry terrible scars. Born in France of Ivorian heritage, Evans tells me his title speaks to how the soldiers were ‘stretched between’ two places. ‘My work is my story. I’m a kid from the diaspora … It’s African because I’m African, and it’s European because I’m European, and it’s universal because I’m universal, too.’

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Franklin Nelson

Franklin Nelson works for the Financial Times, commissioning and writing on UK politics, the economy and society as well as books and the arts.