🇲🇦MoroccoNorth Africa
Halima Forati's "Still Life" exhibition at Villa des Arts in Rabat explores image beyond the visible
via Le Matin2 min read
The Villa des Arts in Rabat is hosting "Still Life," an exhibition by Moroccan self-taught artist Halima Forati, from April 16 to May 31, 2026. Forati's work, which is close to hyperrealism, focuses on meticulous detail, with each element treated with methodical rigor. She uses her own photographs as an essential step in creating her paintings, ensuring total control over her creative process. The exhibition's title, "Still Life," refers to a classic genre, but Forati reinterprets it with a contemporary sensibility, incorporating a rich visual vocabulary drawn from Moroccan heritage, including mosaics, traditional objects, and fragments related to social rituals from marriage to mourning. Her compositions are the result of a patient assembly process, merging multiple images into a coherent scene. In this reconstructed space, each object seems to carry a memory, transforming the still life into a mental territory shaped by solitude, contemplation, and a focus on light and shadow. These contrasts give the works symbolic and social dimensions. Forati reinterprets the codes of still life, questioning them and imbuing them with a discreet yet persistent narrative density. The exhibition invites viewers to consider how objects, in their apparent immobility, continue to carry stories, traces, and silences.
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