Ghita Skali

Ghita Skali (Casablanca, 1992) is an artist living and working in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Her works are exhibited internationally at Palais de Tokyo, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Kulte Gallery, Beirut Art Fair, Lyon Biennale, Het Nieuwe Instituut and Castlefield Gallery. From 2018 to 2020, Skali was a participant at De Ateliers in Amsterdam.

Education

• 2018/2020: Participant at De Ateliers
• 2017: Post-graduate program at École Nationale Supérieure des beaux-arts de Lyon
• 2016: National Master in Fine Arts at École Nationale Supérieure d'Arts à la Villa Arson
• 2014: National Fine Arts Diploma at École Nationale Supérieure d'Arts à la Villa Arson

Solo exhibitions

• 2020: Offspring, De Ateliers, Amsterdam
• 2019: Narrative Machines Ep2, Ete 78, Brussels
• 2018: The disappearance of the monkey's rock, Hotel Oberstadt, Mönchengladbach
• 2017: Palm Attacks: few invasive species, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin

Works

The Hole's Journey (2020)

"A worn-out floor, the hole underneath, a political activist, and the Ouled Sbita tribe are the protagonists in this political satire. For 23 years, the director’s chair at an international art institute scratched the wooden floor. This 102cm x 120cm floor section is cut out and sent to an expropriated piece of land in Morocco. In The Hole’s Journey, Ghita Skali uses sharp wit, personal stories and playful editing to touch on specific power dynamics and freedom of choice."

"One might think that many of Ghita Skali’s installations, sculptures or videos are purely fictitious thought experiments carried out by the artist to satirise partly absurd, partly violent situations and events, both social and political. And yet, they reveal themselves to be rooted in reality. Even when she does not confront, she criticises, and always with a sense of humour. She involves the visitors of her exhibitions by becoming the host who knows exactly what is expected of her. And what do we expect from her with our Western understanding of art? We expect her to represent and show us what art from the Arab world looks like. Suddenly we find ourselves full of prejudice, and the work proposes counterpoints to these complexities. Instead of bringing something from ‘there’ to us, Skali sent something from Amsterdam to Morocco. During this process, the artist intensively studied the floor in the office of De Ateliers’ director: to be precise, a 119cm x 160 cm section of the wooden parquet. It was on this very piece of floor that the former director of the institution rolled back and forth with his office chair for 23 years, resulting in a very visible sign of wear: a hollow in the wood. Inspired by the works of Jan Dibbets and Ger van Elk, she used this hollow to propose a distortion of these hegemonic forms and then inserted it into another reality: the land predation in Morocco. She had the floor cut out and sent to Morocco as an artefact and there, in collaboration with ——— ———— and —— ———, the floor was sent, well packed, to the Ouled Sbita tribe, who were unlawfully expropriated by the government. We know that the floor is now in Morocco, but not much else. The work is also an experiment in terms of a traditional documentation of a (local) struggle and at the same time a a work in the process of being created on different continents, in different cultural environments and under numerous unforeseeable influences. In front of the director’s office stands the performer Nadia Bekkers, who has the function of a doorwoman for the work “A reversed exclusion system” and lets people pass according to a system of terror that follows no logic. Just as people are selectively harassed by authorities because of their appearance, visitors now have to endure the seemingly arbitrary harassment if they want to see the hole with their own eyes."

The Invaders (2021)

"In The Invaders by Ghita Skali, protagonist Cheikha Houria - a popular singer and dancer - is alarmed to find out white Europeans are invading her country in a camembert-shaped UFO. Statements like “We have to get used to them and to accept them in our society” echo the language that is often used to talk about immigrants that arrive from outside of Europe. During the first lockdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic, many Europeans were struggling to get back to Europe while stranded on their vacation locations all over the world. Inspired by this reverse of immigration and travel streams, Skali humoristicly interweaves fact with fiction and pop culture with the colonial past of France and Morocco."

"The Invaders originally is an American science-fiction television series from the 1970s about aliens invading earth. In the 1990s the French humorists Les Inconnus made a remake of this TV show where the invaders were migrants living in France. Transforming the aliens into Arab and Asian migrants is a cynical gesture which is also showing the absurdity of the extreme right discourses. The Invaders by Skali becomes a remake of this remake where the world went upside down and the attraction from the Global South to Europe is reversed."

Ali Baba Express: Episode 2 (2020)

"In Ali Baba Express: Episode 2 (2020), Ghita Skali brings to light an underground transport economy that connects Morocco to numerous places in Europe. The physical form of the work appears as an endless supply of verbena tea leaves that changes over time, depending on the amount of tea taken home by the audience. Through mediating new transactions when restocking is necessary, Skali maintains a direct exchange between the museum and the day to day reality outside the museum walls. The work depicts a system in which supply and demand is driven by an economy centered on memory and reliving memories through taste: Why is a taste more intense when you know your access to it is limited?"

Awards

2020: Nominated for Aware Prize for Women

Collections

• Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam
• Lisser Art Museum
• Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo

References

This article "Ghita Skali" is from Wikipedia. The list of its authors can be seen in its historical and/or the page Edithistory:Ghita Skali. Articles copied from Draft Namespace on Wikipedia could be seen on the Draft Namespace of Wikipedia and not main one.

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