{"id":6641,"date":"2018-05-05T00:23:00","date_gmt":"2018-05-05T00:23:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cmgmarrakech.com\/?post_type=expositions&p=6641"},"modified":"2024-10-23T19:19:00","modified_gmt":"2024-10-23T19:19:00","slug":"be-your-heart","status":"publish","type":"expositions","link":"https:\/\/cmgmarrakech.com\/en\/expositions\/be-your-heart\/","title":{"rendered":"Be Your Heart"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mo Baala : A Conversation<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Often the details provided at an exhibition inhibit a viewer\u2019s ability to decide for themselves what a work is about or feel content with their perception of a piece. Constant streams of information have implied that there is a right and wrong. For some artists this is the case, but for Mo Baala, it is not. He welcomes alternative understandings and equally ensures that there is no \u2018correct\u2019 conclusion. This thought- piece is based on an interview I had with Mo Baala in March 2018, in which he said, \u201cMy purpose as an artist is to propose possibilities\u2026I don\u2019t like when the subject colonises you.\u201d As such, this article only covers some themes represented in the work broadly and focuses more on Mo Baala\u2019s creative process.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Balance: a word that has continually come to mind when I have thought about Mo Baala\u2019s life and work following our conversation. He strives for balance, or \u201chalf- half\u201d as he says. While creating, he plans, but also welcomes disorder. Likewise, he solves problems, while also creating new ones. For Mo Baala the creative process is a \u201csensitive situation\u201d between opposites.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A visual representation of balance lies in a recurring motif in his work; the three figures that stem from his experiences with his parents as a child. Not only do the figures directly relate to his parent\u2019s fighting, but to broader themes as well: \u201clove and hate, peace and war.\u201d He expresses how he has dreamt about bringing his family members together and so he attempts to unite them in his work. When a figure does not want to understand the others he turns it into an animal to downgrade it. He detests the autonomy and lack of co-operation the figure represents. Mo Baala\u2019s work acts as a place of confluence for multiple polarities, he is always trying to mediate the oppositions and conflict. Mo Baala does this, not just with the figures in his work, but with any opposition he faces while creating, from choice of colour and material to the emotions he is experiencing. He revels in fusing complex oppositions, but all the while, as he states in a video for an exhibition a two years ago, \u201cI try to say everything and I try to say nothing, to represent everything and to represent nothing.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Two years on, Mo Baala has focused less on his experiences growing up and more so on his relationship with art and who he is in the creative process. Of course, the division of these experiences is not clean cut, particularly as Mo Baala started creating from a very young age. Mo Baala explains, \u201cLife feeds art and art feeds life, you feel the balance between them.\u201d He draws from both his own experiences as well as the experiences of others, \u201cgiving a value to everything and proposing questions\u201d predominantly those of why and how. For him art is safe space to propose these complex questions, he describes it as \u201can adventure that is not dangerous\u201d but equally, he elaborates, \u201cyou do not go on adventure if you do not feel powerful enough.\u201d This adventure can take half an hour or several years because Mo Baala never lets a piece of work leave his studio until he is fully satisfied with it. Even if he loves a piece immediately, he is then confronted with liking it so quickly that it scares him, he feels something must be wrong and thus he must contemplate it further, the work is both \u201cmy heaven and my hell at the same time\u201d he adds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For Mo Baala, \u201cbeing a good artist is to also be a good spectator, to know what quality is.\u201d In order to feel satisfied with a work, to the point where it can leave his studio, Mo Baala has trained himself over the last several years to step away from the work and be a spectator with a different point of view. He describes it as a \u201cserious democratic situation\u201d in which you do not let your natural bias for your own work prevent you from critiquing it, this analysing can take a long time. Mo Baala stresses that he is not just critiquing the aesthetic, but rather the feeling he gets from the piece because that is what he wants his spectators to have. A feeling, whether it be with the subject, the material, whatever catches you, he wants you to feel something and to run with the possibilities. He believes that that is the relationship which \u201cmakes the work rich.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Olivia Peterson\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>","protected":false},"featured_media":6642,"parent":0,"template":"","class_list":["post-6641","expositions","type-expositions","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cmgmarrakech.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/expositions\/6641","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cmgmarrakech.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/expositions"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cmgmarrakech.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/expositions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cmgmarrakech.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6642"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cmgmarrakech.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6641"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}