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© Le Parvis / Valérie Servant

Mehdi-Georges Lahlou

À l'ombre des palmiers
November 16 2024 - January 18 2025
Opening Saturday November 16 3pm-8pm

Mehdi-Georges Lahlou establishes relationships between humans and non-humans within a new ethnoecological narrative. An avant-garde observer of contemporary mutations, he addresses questions of identity, history, migration, religion and cultural domination by integrating living things into the heart of the narrative, rather than considering it as a separate entity.

 

While the archives of a personal nature - memories, letters, scars, photographs - bear witness to the transformations of history, nature is also the repository of collective memory. In his work, non-humans become witness to migration, oppression and the standardization of cultures.

 

His photographs, sculptures, performances, tapestries and installations explore the blind spots of memory and history, weaving together social and environmental issues. By linking animals, plants, rituals, archives and symbols, Mehdi-Georges Lahlou defies classification, revealing the hybrid and fluid nature of identities through chimeras. Releasing the aroma of transpersonal experiences, he celebrates the encounter between the invisible and diversity in all its forms - biological, social and spiritual.

 

The palm tree, central to the artist's work, initiates a contemporary reflection on global migration and geopolitics. Exploited in monoculture for centuries and today accused of replacing primary forests, its fruits (drupe, date, coconut) become complex symbols that combine colonialism and spiritual quest.

 

With La conférence des palmiers, Mehdi-Georges Lahlou revisits Farid al-Din Attar's centuries old initiatory tale "La Conférence des Oiseaux”.  A ceramic androgenic date tree, with multiple heads and branches, establishes a subtle link between the human body and all living matter. Next to it, on a wall tapestry, a bird of paradise sheds a bitter tear. The fruit of another palm, the coconut, in giant “rosary beads”, evokes the movement and adaptation of religious objects across cultures and eras. By revisiting Marian devotion, the artist creates a symbol of migration, demonstrating that sacred objects also integrate and evolve with the territories they cross.

 

By crossing trade routes and internal wanderings, Mehdi-Georges Lahlou suggests that the answers to questions of displacement and exile are often to be found within oneself, in a journey of perpetual connection.

Alice Audouin

Curator, author and consultant in art and ecology, founder of Art of Change 21

October 2024