“A significant portion of Latifa Echakhch’s artistic production consists of site-specific works. These works typically challenge established social frameworks and prevailing opinions and norms articulated within them, all through captivating visual transformations and the frequently present concept of material destruction. The process of inversion and “encounters at the edge” seem to be integral components of the artistic strategy that Latifa nurtures and persists in. It is especially important to emphasise that numerous questions of identity: national, cultural, gender, and others, are interwoven within the coordinates of her transformative artistic process. By utilising the aesthetics of different materials and their configurations, the artist fundamentally alters them through further semantic constructions – and dualities – thereby confronting the experiences of different geographical, historical, political, social, and other contexts.

Drawing upon the palimpsest of historical experience to which the late antique space of the “Kula” Gallery belongs, Latifa Echakhch creates a site-specific installation Waves resembling an immersive theatre production, thus opening a broad platform for discussion about what we supposedly see or know. The semantic threads of the constructed ambiance can be diverse: from surrendering to romantic scenes of the restless sea surface (or, in turn, evoking reminiscences of a well-known work from art history) to interpreting the tragedy of the contemporary world through geopolitical battles and the fate of all those full of hope, tragically lost in the Mediterranean Sea. Dalibor Prančević

Latifa Echakhch was born in 1974 in El Khnansa, Morocco, and lives and works in Martigny, Switzerland. Her sculptures, paintings, and installations poetically incorporate culturally-loaded objects and concepts to expand the viewer’s staid associations with them. Her work has been widely exhibited in one-person exhibitions at institutions including Centre Pompidou, Paris; Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio; Kunsthaus Zurich; MACBA, Barcelona; Nouveau Musée National de Monaco; Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel; Swiss Institute, New York; Tate Modern, London; Le Magasin, Grenoble; and Fondazione Memmo, Rome. She has participated in the Istanbul Biennial, the 54th Venice Biennale, the 11th Sharjah Biennial, and Manifesta 7 in Bolzano, Italy. She was awarded the Marcel Duchamp Prize in 2013 and the Zurich Art Prize in 2015. In 2022, she represent Switzerland at the Venice Biennale.