Khadija El Abyad

Khadija El Abyad is a multidisciplinary Moroccan artist, born in 1991 in Agadir. She lives and works in Rabat. After obtaining a degree in Hispanic fundamental studies, she joins the National Institute of Fine Arts in Tetouan where she graduates in 2016.

“Khadija El Abyad develops her work around the body and nourishes it with elements of strong connotations such as hair, fine flesh tights, sheepskin … The artist handles these founding elements as if they were notes on scores. She manipulates the aspects related to the “body screens” in a multitude of often abstract variations. Daily, she cuts, weaves, embroiders, sews, brushes, composes, manipulates, records to transform her interrogations into a plastic language and autonomous art pieces. Her work is based on a method of collecting and assembling, patiently making several series of new objects, which she manipulates, in short moments of performance, testing the mental boundaries of the intimate and the public space. »

Véronique Collard Bovy

“Khadija El Abyad’s recent research (2019 – ongoing) invites us to think about ways to invent new formal vocabularies that revive the ornamental logic of movement. The structural openness of the work seems to count for the artist in that it allows her to trace itineraries within an ornamental system endowed with a strong symbolic charge. Her reflection also focuses on and the interplay between the veiling and the unveiling of the body and on the attributes that the body shares with the animal. The artist explores the affinities between species through performance that allows the expression of intimacy in the public space and the blurring of socio-cultural landmarks. »

Fatima-Zahra Lakrissa,

for the exhibition “Sieve proof” at 18 Derb el Ferrane, Marrakech