Artist Focus : Latifa Echakhch
ARTIST FOCUS : LATIFA ECHAKHCH
Venice Biennale : The Concert
In collaboration with Alexandre Babel and Francesco Stocchi
April 23–November 27, 2022
Swiss Pavilion, Giardini
To download PDF, click here.

In the beginning was the end: Latifa Echakhch’s cycle of life
The exhibition titled The Concert, is conceived by Latifa Echakhch, in collaboration with percussionist and composer Alexandre Babel and curator Francesco Stocchi.
Gloomy remnants of art fill the first space, where visitors set out on a counterclockwise journey through time. In each room, the atmosphere changes – time runs backwards, from broad daylight to the evening before. Ever more recognizably inspired by folk sculpture and customs, the sculptures, filling the whole space, are increasingly veiled by a spreading darkness.
These are scenes of impermanence, of catharsis, with which installation artist Latifa Echakhch captivates visitors of the Pavilion of Switzerland at this year’s Biennale Arte, scenes that bring to the fore the cycle of life in a multi-layered and complex way. Most of the material used for the exhibition is itself part of a transformation, recycled from previous biennales.
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.
I want people to exit the exhibition as they would a concert, with accelerated heart rates, and their heads full of fragments that re- constitute themselves in the form of variations.
– Latifa Echakhch
For more information, please contact
international@dvirgallery.com
All images are courtesy of the artist. Photo: Annik Wetter & Samuele Cherubini

