Mariam Abouzid Souali bears witness to contemporary social, geopolitical, and environmental challenges on local, global, and universal scales. Her recent works immerse us in the world of childhood and the Olympic Games. However, her characters navigate through strange landscapes: containers, highways, mining fields, industrial ports, and many other symbols of overexploitation, climate crises, and migrations. Moreover, several compositions by Mariam strangely feature an open starry universe in the background, where athletes, ships, and containers navigate, float, and spin. This allusion to the universe, through various images of planets, stars, supernovas, black holes, galaxies, etc., is an invitation not to forget the truth that we all come from stardust.
Thus, her recent paintings reconcile three layers of reality: the time of play and sports, the time of geopolitical play, and the time of the Universe. These layers merge into a new construction that reveals striking similarities between the brief history of human life and that of the Earth, and the grand narrative of the creation of the universe. These juxtaposed space-times in her paintings, often enriched with references to art history and astronomy, prompt us to question the functioning of our world at different speeds.
Mariam Abouzid Souali studied art, French literature, and art history in Morocco and the United States. She is currently a professor of fine arts and art history at the National School of Architecture in Marrakech, Morocco. Recent awards and exhibitions include the Beyond Future Art Prize 2022 (Hong Kong), Zone France (Institut des Cultures de l’Islam, Paris, 2021), “I have this Memory, it is not my own” (Galerie Cécile Fakhoury, Dakar, 2020), Distance Ardente (MRAC, 2020), and Biennale Mediterranea 18.
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