21 october 2022, Flor Linckens
Selective historiography in the work of Mehdi-Georges Lahlou
Until 30 October, a solo exhibition with new works by Mehdi-Georges Lahlou will be on show in Galerie Transit in Mechelen. The artist has a bicultural background: his Spanish mother is Catholic and his Moroccan father is Muslim. This background regularly features in his practice. Lahlou has lived in various cities, including Prague, Athens, Casablanca, Brussels and Paris.
Lahlou works in a multitude of media, from photography, sculpture and performance to video, installation, drawing and painting. Thematically, his works deal with topics like identity, race, the body, history, gender, a sense of cultural belonging, representation in the media, sexuality and colonialism, often in relation to religion. His earlier works, in particular, seem to be an exploration of the duality of his identity. These works therefore build on codes from Eastern and Western visual language, for example in combinations of Islamic motifs and Christian icons. In his work "Portrait according to Molinier…Neshat" (2010) he refers both to the French artist Pierre Molinier and to the work of the Iranian artist Shirin Neshat — including calligraphed texts. In other works, Lahlou wears a veil and “women's clothes”.
Mehdi-Georges Lahlou, Of the Confused Memory - April 22, 1915, 2022, Galerie Transit
Recently, Lahlou completed a residency program at the Fondation Fiminco in Romainville, just outside of Paris. There, he made a series of photographic prints, which he provided with a thick layer of matte black charcoal, which largely obscures the original archive image. Yet the dead bodies on the ground are still clearly visible in "Of the Confused Memory - April 22, 1915" (2022). The images refer to the very first use of chlorine gas, an experiment by the infamous German chemist Fritz Haber — who, wryly, would end up winning a Nobel Prize in 1918 for his invention of the chemical fertilizer. Although most people will be familiar with the inhumane effects of chemical weapons, most will not know that the majority of the men from the front line, who first came into contact with this horror weapon at Ypres on 22 April 1915 at Ypres, were from the then French colonies or “protectorates”: present-day Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco. While these soldiers have been essential to the eventual victory, they are rarely given the credit they deserve in history books — similar to the ways in which black Americans have “disappeared” en masse from the visual coverage of the 1945 victory parades, giving the illusion that it was a white victory. Lahlou seems to be able to convey a multitude of messages in this series, for example about colonial oppression and selective historiography.
Mehdi-Georges Lahlou, Of the Grenadier, 2022, Galerie Transit.
Lahlou also made the work "Of the Grenadier" (2022) during the same period, which refers to the double meaning of the word in French: it means both soldier and pomegranate tree. A symbol of death and of fertility and abundance. In this bust, the pomegranates seem to have exploded, the blood-red colour is automatically added by your brain. Lahlou refers to the contradiction in the ways in which war is depicted. In the exhibition we also see a series of sculptures based on male heads, which are also made of charcoal. Their faces are pierced with symbolic flowers and plants such as bird-of-paradise flowers and leaves and seeds of the Japanese Cycas Revoluta palm. 'Looking for Simurgh', the title of the exhibition at Galerie Transit, refers to a poem by the Persian poet Farid ud-Din Attar, better known as Attar van Nishapur.
Mehdi-Georges Lahlou, Petit Rameau, 2022, Galerie Transit
Mehdi-Georges Lahlou studied at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Nantes and at the AKV St. Joost in Breda. His work has been shown at the Centre Pompidou in Malaga, the Bonnefantenmuseum in Maastricht, the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art (Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea) in Rome, the Botanique Museum in Brussels and during the 11th and 13th Dakar Biennale.
