Latifa Echakhch

Latifa Echakhch born 1974, El Khnansa, Morocco. Lives and works between Martigny and Vevey, Switzerland.

Working in painting, sculpture and installations, the artist chooses easily recognisable objects invested with a domestic and/or social burden, which she silences through destruction, deletion or by restoring them. This thereby deprives them of their usage value - pushing their function into oblivion - in order to free the memories attached to them. Echakhch summons memories and frees the ghosts that emerge from these objects. The work of Latifa Echakhch is simultaneously conceptual and romantic, both political and poetic.

Latifa Echakhch's work has been presented in France and abroad in numerous solo exhibitions: at Kunsthaus in Zurich, Switzerland; the Centre Pompidou in Paris; the macLYON in Lyon; the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles; MACBA in Barcelona; FRI ART in Fribourg; Frac Champagne-Ardenne in Reims, France; Swiss Institute in New York; Tate Modern in London; Le Magasin in Grenoble; KIOSK in Ghent, Belgium; the New National Museum of Monaco; the Memmo Foundation in Rome, Italy; Kunsthalle Mainz, Germany; BPS22, in Charleroi, Belgium; as well as group exhibitions and as part of the Istanbul Biennial, the 54th Venice Biennial, the 11th Sharjah Biennial, the Jerusalem Art Focus Biennial and the Manifesta 7 in Bolzano. Echakhch won the Marcel Duchamp Prize 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. Latifa Echakhch represented Switzerland at the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022 and was the invited artist of the Messeplatz Project, for Art Basel, Basel, 2023.