'What do I still hear, once it's quiet again?'
Moroccan-born French artist Latifa Echakhch is representing Switzerland at the Biennale art exhibition in Venice. For her, memories are never just personal and there is a richness in not being tied to a particular identity.
This content was published on April 23, 2022 - 10:30 April 23, 2022 - 10:30
The story begins with a piano. “I wanted to learn to play it,” she says. A friend replied: “For that you need a piano, and for the piano a home, and for the home a country.” She decided on Switzerland.
Echakhch, 47, has lived for ten years in Vevey, overlooking Lake Geneva, with her children. It does not matter if it was for love of the piano or some other reason – it is a nice story. And it brings us directly to the Swiss Pavilion in Venice, where she has trodden a new path, a musical one.
“I felt the strong need to regenerate my work and to understand how I have been working,” Echakhch says.
There have been few breaks in her career so far. Not long after she completed her art studies in France in 2000 – she studied in Grenoble, Cergy (Paris) and Lyon – she found success with her large-scale installations. Every year she was in numerous group exhibitions, and solo exhibitions too. In 2013 she won the Prix Marcel Duchamp, the main French art award, and in 2015 the Zurich Art Prize. Most recently she has joined the Pace Gallery, one of the most powerful players in the global art market. Her solo show at the Venice Biennale is being regarded as a dive into the deeper waters of international art.
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