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Mounir Fatmi b. 1970

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Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: Mounir Fatmi, Forget, 2010

Mounir Fatmi b. 1970

Forget, 2010
Helmet and skull in ceramic
24 x 30 x 34 cm
11 3/4 x 9 1/2 x 13 3/8 in
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Forget can be seen as a first conclusion to the project “Fuck the Architect”, begun in 2007. The installation functions as an abandoned, deserted building site, where the presence of...
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Forget can be seen as a first conclusion to the project “Fuck the Architect”, begun in 2007.
The installation functions as an abandoned, deserted building site, where the presence of death establishes a new angle of reflection. The artist has chosen fragile materials such as porcelain to create the skulls, as well as the hard hats that are meant to protect them. Everything is vulnerable. This paradox clearly demonstrates the fragility of thought as well as the architecture inspired by it. Everything is in the process of falling, an interminable fall. When the majority of theories, systems and ideological structures with which the contemporary world has been constructed are in crisis, what must be clung to and what must be completely forgotten?

When Giuseppe Penone executed his Landscapes of the Brain twenty years ago, the report that went with it said a lot: “the bone of the skull”, he wrote, “is a plastic material for the brain, which structures and adapts it to its own shape”. The skull, shield and blind window to the quality of being human, has the bold privilege of symbolising the fundamental enlightening acquisition: knowledge.
Forget, mounir fatmi’s memento mori, lets us rediscover once again the conjunction of life and death, which brought to a human level, is the perpetual combat to attain knowledge. The piece represents the result of a thought-process, initiated by the artist, on the constructive process of human thought (in reference to the series, The Monuments, 2008 – 2009), and seems to exemplify the perfect alliance of science and philosophy found in art. Art's powerful impact is perceptible
throughout its history, from the first fifteenth century Northern school vanitas, and is rendered in an even more relevant way today.

In medical law, human death is official as soon as cerebral activity has ceased. It is according to this criterion that life is, from that point on, understood to be reduced to a memory – “an imprint in time” by which G. Didi-Huberman refers to the friction brought about between the supreme organ that governs our existence, and the inside of its shell. Enclosing the most advanced bio-engineering possible, this cloned, styled, painted and repainted skull reworks its original iconography. A secular metaphor for the ephemeral and the precariousness which characterises us, the naked bone of the human skull used to present the brutal contrast between its raw reality and the poetry of its message. Customised and reduced, not without irony, by mounir fatmi, it attains a new
symbolism, which resolutely breaks with the genre. The artifice of this effigy, protecting its content and protected itself from its immediate surroundings, seems well-adjusted to the contemporary environment, where the banal mixes with the creative.
Thus the installation, Forget, plunges us directly into this permanent site of contemplation and questioning which supersede the fundamental dimension of the brain to call all systems of human thought into question.


Tzvetomira Tocheva, 2010.

translation: Caroline Rossiter
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