Deconstructing the Code: Craft Collaborations in Morocco

Sara Ouhaddou discusses working w/ female weavers in the Atlas Mountains, potters in Marrakesh, and young female embroiderers in Tetouan.

In this conversation, Dr Mariam Rosser-Owen of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, will speak with the French-Moroccan artist, Sara Ouhaddou, about her past projects working with female weavers in the Atlas Mountains, with potters in Marrakesh to produce geometric ceramic tiles, and with young female embroiderers in Tetouan. Sara will also discuss her current project, Sin Ithran, Ur Mqadan, Rousn (Two Stars, Unbalanced, They Burn), in which she is developing a work on glass to research the use of architectural coloured glass windows in medieval Morocco.

The artist Sara Ouhaddou lives between Morocco and France. She works in situ and produces works based on encounters with communities, craftspeople and researchers, while exploring heritage sites and objects. Each of her works is a project of learning, exchange of knowledge, and intimate or universal stories. She participated in the 2020 exhibitions: Global(e) Resistance, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France (https://www.centrepompidou.fr); Manifesta: The European Nomadic Biennial, Trait-Union, Marseille (https://manifesta.org); and Our World is Burning, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (https://www.palaisdetokyo.com/en/event/our-world-burning).

Mariam Rosser-Owen has been a curator in the Middle Eastern Section at the Victoria and Albert Museum since 2002, specializing in the arts of the Arab world, in particular the Islamic Mediterranean and North Africa. In 2015, she was awarded an Art Fund New Collecting Award, to research and collect contemporary craft from Morocco, Tunisia and Egypt. She organized the conference “Middle Eastern Crafts: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow,” held at the V&A in October 2018, out of which grew a guest-edited special issue of the Journal of Modern Craft (13/1, 2020). She has curated the small exhibition “Contemporary Ceramic Art from the Middle East,” which will open at the V&A in 2021.

This conversation will be co-hosted by the series organizer, Dr Fahmida Suleman, Curator, Islamic World, Royal Ontario Museum.