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Article contents
Art in the Streets: Modern Art, Museum Practice and the Urban Environment in Contemporary Morocco
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 March 2016
Extract
Every summer, cultural festivals take place all over Morocco, and streets in towns and cities become animated scenes for the articulation of Moroccan contemporary culture. So animated, heterogeneous and pluralistic has this festival scene become that the semiofficial newspaper for the Islamist PJD party has called these street festivals “vectors of decadence” and performing-artist union officials have declared that they feel threatened by the “foreign invasion” of internationally-based diaspora groups. Recently, in a critique of these attitudes, the magazine Telquel reported that they are “sick of the wet-rags of the festival season” that deny “millions of happy festival-goers the occasional…free oasis in the grand cultural desert of Morocco.” Describing the street as an oasis of culture vis-à-vis the desert landscape of Moroccan cultural institutions is not a new trope. In this paper I explore how Moroccan artists have engaged with the potential, promise and problems of art in the street when gallery spaces and museums fail to integrate modern art into a wider Moroccan cultural landscape.
- Type
- Special Section: Art Without History?
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © Middle East Studies Association of North America 2008
References
End Notes
Unless otherwise noted, all translations are mine.
1 Telquel Online no. 253–254 (January 5, 2007): http://www.telquel-online.com/.
2 Ibid.
3 I discuss this topic in greater depth in my forthcoming book: Past, Present and Absent Museums: Staging Art and Modernity in Morocco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota 2009).
4 Ali Amahan, interview by author, Ministry of Culture, Rabat, 19 May 2000.
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10 Ibid.
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