CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
Latest editorial
Riotous colour and queer resistance from the Maghreb
LEO BOIX recommends a refreshing, non-Western and subversive look at what it means to be LGBTQI+ in Morocco
Soufiane Ababri Bedwork, 2023 (L to R) Men in the sun; La Reparation
[Rebecca Fanuele]
KENNY MacASKILL relishes a fictionalised account of the life and death of the principled Irish anti-colonialist, executed for betraying his English imperial masters
FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
JAMIE BRITTON recommends this fine analysis of the architectural, ecological and infrastructural destruction of the Gaza Strip
Soufiane Ababri: Their mouths were full of bumblebees but it was me who was pollinated
The Curve, Barbican
SINCE the so-called Arab Spring of 2011, Morocco has seen a growing social movement that has managed to mobilise large numbers of citizens around socio-economic, political and identity demands.
Within those groups, activists who identified as LGBTQI+ brought forward necessary discussions around sexual orientation and the rights of that specific community within contemporary Morocco and in the wider Arab world.
Moroccan artist Soufiane Ababri (b1985) has added his own voice to the struggle with a dazzling art commission currently at the Barbican’s Curve Gallery — his first solo exhibition at a major British institution.
Similar stories
MIRANDA RICHMOND relishes the gloriously liberated art of Roy Oxlade, and traces his method back to the thinking of David Bomberg, his acknowledged teacher
SIMON PARSONS applauds an artist who rescues and rehumanises stories of women, the victims of violence, from a feminist perspective
MARJORIE MAYO welcomes an account of family life after Oscar Wilde, a cathartic exercise, written by his grandson
WILL STONE applauds a fine production that endures because its ever-relevant portrait of persecution