Latifa Echakhch

Currently based in the Swiss city of Vevey, Latifa Echakhch was born in 1974 in El Khnansa, Morocco. When she was three, her family relocated to France, where she attended the École supérieure d’Art de Grenoble and later received degrees from the National School of Arts Cergy-Pontoise and the Lyon National School of Fine Arts. She began her studio practice in 2001. In 2007, Echakhch presented A chaque stencil une révolution at Le Magasin, Grenoble, as part of her first solo museum exhibition. Echakhch later showed the work at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Pinault Collection, Venice; and Tate Modern, London. Echakhch won the Marcel Duchamp Prize, France’s most vaunted art award, in 2013. As Alfred Pacquement, then-Director of the Centre Pompidou and head of the jury for the award, said of the artist at the time, “Her work, between surrealism and conceptualism, questions with economy and precision the importance of symbols and reflects the fragility of modernism.” In 2015, Echakhch presented Screen Shot at the Museum Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich, and she was awarded the Zurich Art Prize. The installation comprised a labyrinth of paravents made from canvas panels, atop which the artist draped her own clothes soaked in India ink and giant carnival figures. Echakhch has said of the work, “Many times in my work practice I’ve been focused on what we call ‘ la dépossession ’ of Christ, this moment when his clothes are taken by people as he walks the streets, leaving him with almost nothing. Sacrificed by the other and for the other. It’s for me a strong image of a forced minimalism.”