The Casablanca Art School (1962-1987) (EMPIRE LINES x Tate St Ives)

Curator Morad Montazami assembles the revolutionary artist-professors and students of the Casablanca Art School who constructed the post-colonial state of Morocco in the 20th century, and how North African crafts were part of both transnational networks, and local traditions, pre-dating Western European modernism.

The Casablanca Art School proposed a bold, revolutionary new wave of Arab visual culture following Morocco’s declaration of independence from French and Spanish colonial rule in 1956. Reflecting a new social awareness, Farid Belkahia, Mohamed Chabâa and Mohamed Melehi looked beyond Western European academic traditions - and demanded the removal of all Greco-Roman sculptures - sending students to travel more locally, where they encountered traditional arts and crafts more modern than Klee and Kandinsky.

The Tate is the only institution in the world to hold works by all three of the Casablanca trio. Morad Montazami, a curator of a landmark new show in St Ives, explores how the School’s many artists worked across painting, sculpture, graphic design, and architectural murals, integrating art and infrastructure, and artists and the economy. Plus, why we should decentre the Bauhaus as a Western European school, how artists incorporated modern abstract influences alongside Mexican, pan-Arabic, and Marxist revolutionary politics, why a Dutch anthropologist coined the phrase Afro-Berberism, and how the absence of museum spaces after empire provided an opportunity for more public, accessible art - for the nation to ‘build itself’.

The Casablanca Art School: Platforms and Patterns for a Postcolonial Avant-Garde, 1962-1987 runs at the Tate St Ives in Cornwall until 14 January 2024, then at the Sharjah Art Foundation into 2024.

For more, you can read my article.

WITH: Morad Montazami, art historian, a publisher and a curator. He is the director for the platform Zamân Books & Curating, committed to develop studies of Arab, Asian and African modernities, and co-curator of The Casablanca Art School.

ART: ‘Multiple Marrakech/Multiple Flamme (Multiple Marrakech, Multiple Flame), Mohamed Ataallah (1969)’.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

Follow EMPIRE LINES on Twitter: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936 And Instagram: instagram.com/empirelinespodcast

Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines