Programme leaflet 'Untitled 14km'

Youness Atbane chooses as a backdrop for his show Untitled 14km, an exhibition on contemporary art from the MENA region in a Western museum. He brings together artists, a curator, a director, a technician and a ghost poet from the Arab-Andalusian period. The museum becomes the battlefield where symbols are fought over, where desires compete and where works and people end up being traded. The artist extends his questioning of contemporary creation, sometimes called *Arab, sometimes *MENA, or even sometimes *Southern Mediterranean, on a new generation of artists divided between the West and the rest of the world, feeding on both influences, while playing on the points of rupture and junction with local popular and intellectual cultures. Without connotation, free in his positions, if not in his movements, this contemporary artist from the MENA region resolutely turns his back on the restrictive criterion of origin. In this global context of economic and identity crises, contemporary art has certainly gained a foothold in this part of the world.

Youness Atbane is Born in 1982, currently lives and works between Casablanca and Berlin. His artistic practice is based on a critical relationship to the fields of art, its actors and its geopolitics.
He began to follow different programs and gained artistic experiences in the fields of performance and visual art in France, Morocco, Belgium, Spain. In 2008, he took part in the Master performing art program "EX E.R.CE08" at the CCN of Montpelier. In 2010, he graduates with a master in Art -Literature and museology- from the University of Nice.
His practice consists of three areas: live performance as a space of reflection, installation making as an outcome of the performance act and photography and drawing as an archive. All three areas are interconnected and interdependent: the exploratory nature of his work brings together performative and narrative practices; the nature of his work shows both discursive and formal qualities.
Atbane has exhibited his installations and performances at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome, the parallel project in the Venice Biennale in 2011, Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, the Museum of Modern & Contemporary Art Mohammed VI in Rabat, the Ostrale Biennale in Dresden and recently Headland Center for the Arts in San Francisco and Massmoca Museum in Massachusetts. British Museum & Mucem in Marseille.