Mounir Fatmi is a Moroccan artist who lives and works in Paris. Born in 1970 in Tangier, Morocco he spent his childhood at the flea market in the Casabarata district, one of the poorest neighborhoods in the city. He studied at the School of Fine Arts in Casablancaand the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. His multimedia practice encompasses video, installation, drawing, painting and sculpture. He works on obsolete materials and their uncertain futures, he criticizes the illusory mechanisms that bind humanity to technology, ideologies and their influences in a society in crisis.
Influenced by his childhood memoriesconsidering them as his first artistic education and comparing flea market to a ruined museum or a barometer allowing him to understand society. Fatmi is an innovative artist who questions his role as an artist in a society in crisis.
By his continues struggle to find a fitting role as an artist emerged the essential aspects of his artistic work. Influenced by the idea of dead media and the collapse of industrial and consumerist civilization, he places the work of art between Archive and Archeology.
Fatmi explores various mediums and cautiously selects certain medium that he finds more communicative to the idea of the work. He under the prism of the Language, Architecture and Machine trinityquestions the obsolescence of materials such as antenna cables, old typewriters, photocopiers or VHS tapes. His artistic research constitutes the development of a thought on the history of technologies and their influences in popular culture.
In 2006, he won the Uriöt prize, Amsterdam, the grand prize of the Dakar Biennial and the Cairo Biennial Award in 2010.
