mounir fatmi presents his new solo exhibition “Walking on the Light” at the CCC. It brings together an important group of around fifteen recent works. Placing the question of otherness and the exploration of language at the forefront, the artist outlines a journey haunted by the presence of two writers: Salman Rushdie and John Howard Griffin. Two men of language whose lives were marked by the experience of deconstructing their identity and re-creating it through the figure of the Other. <\/p>\n
The photomontage “Who is Joseph Anton?” (2012) takes us on a journey in the footsteps of Salman Rushdie, through the alias he used to continue living and writing in forced clandestinity. A contraction of the names of two other writers, Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekov, the name Joseph Anton brings together three authors, three identities and three voices, all merging to create a new portrait: that of the fugitive. The features of the threatened writer reappear in the video “Sleep Al Naim” (2005-2012), depicting him in the ambivalence of a quiet, untroubled sleep, a state of mixed vulnerability and strength. <\/p>\n
Several of the works in the exhibition take us back to the experiments carried out in the 1960s by white writer John Howard Griffin to blend in with the black American community and share in its experience at a time of racial discrimination. The author did not hesitate to change the very colour of his skin irreversibly. His writings bear witness to this plunge into the heart of the experience of the Other, a plunge into the blackness of the image from which he would never recover. \u2028John Howard Griffin studied medicine at the Faculty of Medicine in Tours, then became an intern at the Tours psychiatric hospital under the direction of Dr Pierre Fromenty, where he conducted experiments using Gregorian music on criminally ill patients. Enlisted in the army during the Second World War, he received shrapnel in the brain and went blind. In 1957, he miraculously recovered his sight. <\/p>\n
Crossing these two literary evocations, mounir fatmi presents a dozen works, some of which, like “Mehr Licht”, are emblematic of his work. Along the way, the exhibition explores the violence of history and civilisation, expressed through the written word and different languages, religious, political and literary. <\/p>\n
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