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IBN EL FAROUK
- Morocco - Born : 1964 in Casablanca
Born in Casablanca, where he grew up in the Bourgogne district, Zouhir Ibn El Farouk was drawn to images from an early age: as a child, he built makeshift viewers to study scraps of film salvaged from his neighbourhood cinema. A devoted film lover in 1990s Casablanca, he soon moved from watching images to making them. After studying philosophy, he chose photography as his language. A French-Moroccan artist, he now lives and works in Paris.
He holds a degree in visual arts and contemporary art, specialising in new media, and was a researcher at the AIAC laboratory (Arts of Images and Contemporary Art) at Université Paris 8, under Professor François Soulages. This dual grounding in theory and practice shapes his entire approach: for him, photography is not merely a way of recording reality but a subject of inquiry in its own right — its history, its devices and its processes.
Since the early 2000s, his work has explored what he calls a “paradoxical abstraction” in photography. Often working without a camera, he intervenes directly on light-sensitive material, peels apart the layers of silver emulsion and brings analogue and digital processes into dialogue. Light, colour and matter become the true subjects of his images, which sit close to painting. His series — Oxymore, Ambiguïtés optiques, Informe, Décalcomanie d’émulsion — lay bare the very body of photography.
Exhibiting since 1996 in Morocco, Portugal, Spain and France, he has shown his work at the Instituto Cervantes in Casablanca, the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris (where he was also an artist in residence), the Claude Lévi-Strauss Library, Espace Rivages at the Hassan II Foundation in Rabat, Galerie Shart in Casablanca, the Oran Biennale and Galerie Regard Sud in Lyon. A regular participant in Morocco’s National Photographic Art Salon and the Rabat Photography Encounters, he received the Jury’s Favourite Award at the Automne photographique en Champsaur in 2017.
IBN EL FAROUK
- Morocco - Born : 1964 in Casablanca
Born in Casablanca, where he grew up in the Bourgogne district, Zouhir Ibn El Farouk was drawn to images from an early age: as a child, he built makeshift viewers to study scraps of film salvaged from his neighbourhood cinema. A devoted film lover in 1990s Casablanca, he soon moved from watching images to making them. After studying philosophy, he chose photography as his language. A French-Moroccan artist, he now lives and works in Paris.
He holds a degree in visual arts and contemporary art, specialising in new media, and was a researcher at the AIAC laboratory (Arts of Images and Contemporary Art) at Université Paris 8, under Professor François Soulages. This dual grounding in theory and practice shapes his entire approach: for him, photography is not merely a way of recording reality but a subject of inquiry in its own right — its history, its devices and its processes.
Since the early 2000s, his work has explored what he calls a “paradoxical abstraction” in photography. Often working without a camera, he intervenes directly on light-sensitive material, peels apart the layers of silver emulsion and brings analogue and digital processes into dialogue. Light, colour and matter become the true subjects of his images, which sit close to painting. His series — Oxymore, Ambiguïtés optiques, Informe, Décalcomanie d’émulsion — lay bare the very body of photography.
Exhibiting since 1996 in Morocco, Portugal, Spain and France, he has shown his work at the Instituto Cervantes in Casablanca, the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris (where he was also an artist in residence), the Claude Lévi-Strauss Library, Espace Rivages at the Hassan II Foundation in Rabat, Galerie Shart in Casablanca, the Oran Biennale and Galerie Regard Sud in Lyon. A regular participant in Morocco’s National Photographic Art Salon and the Rabat Photography Encounters, he received the Jury’s Favourite Award at the Automne photographique en Champsaur in 2017.
