Installation views of The Concert by Latifa Echakhch, Swiss Pavilion at the 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, 2022. Courtesy of the artist and the galleries Dvir, kaufmann repetto and Pace. Photo: Samuele Cherubini
Between ritual and rhythm
The artist Latifa Echakhch, who lives in Switzerland, evokes the ritual fires that are common in many cultures. They include the lighting of straw dolls for the St. John’s fire, which is supposed to protect against demons and diseases around the solstice at the end of June or, in Switzerland, the burning of the “Böögg” on Zurich’s Sechseläutenplatz to bid farewell to the winter season. Fire is always both the end and the beginning on a constantly turning wheel of time. Latifa Echakhch also enters into a dialogue with the building designed by Bruno Giacometti in 1951. The artist revisits its architectural program and appropriates the entirety of its spaces, exploring their relationship to light and the different sounds that emerge from them.
The exhibition plays with harmonies and dissonances, with the mixed feelings of expectation, fulfilment and disappearance. The sculptures are part of an orchestrated and enveloping experience, a rhythmic and spatial proposal that allows viewers to experience a fuller perception of time and of their own body.