“When the minds of men seem narrow to you, tell yourself that the earth is vast. Never hesitate to move away – beyond all seas, beyond all borders, beyond all homelands, beyond all beliefs.”
(Léon l’Africain, Amin Maalouf, 1987)

The collective exhibition Au-delà de toutes les mers (Beyond All Seas) – featured at La Condition Publique – explores the circulation of peoples, languages, cultures, and narratives around and beyond the Mediterranean Sea – particularly between France and Morocco. Deeply shaped by Western colonization, especially French, as well as by a long history of geopolitical relations and multicultural influences, these movements are considered here not as simple displacements from one place to another, but as ever-shifting flows that also generate connection and the unexpected – echoing the words of the Creole philosopher and writer Édouard Glissant. “What matters in relation is the act of bringing into contact – not fusion, but exchange within difference.”
(Poetics of Relation, Gallimard, 1990)

Co-conceived by Le Cube independent art room (Rabat, Morocco) and La Condition Publique (Roubaix, France) on the occasion of the “Mediterranean Season 2026” led by the Institut Français, this exhibition brings together around a dozen artists, all of whom are intimately or artistically connected to Morocco. Their works reveal the complex ties woven – whether fortunate, unfortunate, or accidental – across and on either side of this “liquid continent,” a vast space of interconnections between the Maghreb and Europe.

Structured around three main themes – geographical circulation, the circulation of languages, and immaterial circulation (memories, know-how, beliefs) – the exhibition examines, in light of the history that has shaped this region, how people, narratives, and objects move, transform, and interact with one another in a world in constant motion.

Artists Ziad Naitaddi, Sarah Van Melick, Katrin Ströbel, and Mohammed Laouli approach the Mediterranean as a space of crossings, movements, and even uprooting, where back-and-forth journeys—largely shaped by colonial domination and the French protectorate—can result either in absence and the loss of connection, or in encounters and the contribution of a necessary otherness. Within this shifting geography, individual stories and trajectories intersect, intertwine, and tell the story of a polyphonic and fragmented world.

The duo Irena Eden & Stijn Lernout, along with Badr El Hammami, Karima El Karmoudi, and Leila Sadel, explore the circulation of languages, narratives, and the partial memories that emerge between Morocco and France. Through migration and movement, languages and the stories they carry are transformed, evolve, are transmitted or fade away, giving rise to new forms of expression.

Finally, works by Khadija El Abyad, Ahmad Karmouni, Imane Zoubai, Karima El Karmoudi, and Leila Sadel evoke the circulation, transmission, and reinterpretation of intangible heritage, memory, and know-how through the use of materials and crafts rooted in Moroccan territory. Whether reappropriated, forgotten, or sustained by these artists, gestures, materials, and symbols circulate like living energies. Presented in this exhibition in Roubaix, their works once again set these elements in motion, opening up, perhaps, new possibilities for dialogue, perspectives, exchanges, and renewal.

The artists featured in “Beyond All Seas” disrupt, shift, and recompose narratives, memories, and cultural identities. They invite us to consider “encounter, interference, shock, harmonies and disharmonies between cultures, within the realized totality of the world-earth”—what Édouard Glissant simply brought together under the term “creolization” (Treatise of the Whole-World, Gallimard, 1997).

With the participation of artists:
Irena Eden & Stijn Lernout, Khadija El Abyad, Badr El Hammami, Karima, Fadma & Allal El Karmoudi, Ahmad Karmouni, Mohammed Laouli, Katrin Ströbel, Ziad Naitaddi, Leila Sadel, Sarah Van Melick, Imane Zoubai.

Co-curated by: Ninon Duhamel (La Condition Publique), Elisabeth Piskernik (Le Cube – independent art room)
General curator: Ismaël Jamaleddine
With the support of: Institut Français – Mediterranean Season 2026
Artistic and Cultural Outreach Project (PRAC) of the Hauts-de-France Region
Regional Directorate of Cultural Affairs in Hauts-de-France (DRAC), supporting international and/or cross-border cultural initiatives.

Exhibition opening: Friday, May 29, 2026 I La Condition Publique I Roubaix
Open visits: Wednesdays and Saturdays | 2:00 PM – 7:00 PM
First Sunday of the month | 12:00 PM – 7:00 PM
Guided “Mediterranean” tour: Every Saturday | 4:30 PM – 5:30 PM

image: Katrin Ströbel & Mohammed Laouli, Frontières fluides (Marseille) 2013 – 2025 © KS & ML, adagp, Paris, 2026