Mous Lamrabat’s Blessings from Mousganistan exhibition at Foam deconstructs the notion of normal fashion and blends capitalist Western symbolic logos with Moroccan heritage
The World of Mous Lamrabat
Mous Lamrabat is a Moroccan-born photographer who grew up in Belgium. North African atmospheres and fashion, desert landscapes and clashes between aesthetics provoked by the insertion of Western iconic brands are some of Lamrabat’s signatures.
The world he creates is a utopia named Mousganistan. From here the title of his exhibition Blessings from Mousganistan on view at Foam – Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam –until the fourth of December 2022.
Eclection is what constitutes Mousganistan, an imagined place that Lamrabat has brought together over the past few years as a self-taught photographer. This election is also suggested in the exhibition, where conventional and non-conventional displays intersect, such as lenticular and vacuum-pulled prints interspersed with pink and yellow walls.
Lampoon – Mous Lamrabat
Lamrabat juxtaposes the normal and the unconventional yet playing with humor and creating an exaggeration of a world where cultures that are perceived as opposite coexist in joy. This is Mousganistan and to be living there is a blessing as Lamrabat declares.
It is thus a blessing to be living on the threshold of identity and be enriched by the double experience of being part of two cultures and none at the same time. Here he turns the tables, seeing the positive in what might have been and still be a frustrating experience.
Mous Lamrabat – West meets North African culture and heritage
Through play in compositions and surrealism Lamrabat might confuse the viewer once they first look at his images. Beauty and harmony between contrasting elements such as conventional symbols provide viewers unexpected hints of reflection on diversity but mostly similarities between different cultures.
For example, through the depiction and sometimes juxtaposition of a Nike logo or McDonald’s ‘M’, These well-known symbols are decontextualized and recontextualized beyond their commercial connotation.
The West meets North African culture and heritage, and both are shown in bright and colorful photos where the idea of monoculturalism gets questioned. Indeed, Lamrabat incorporates invitations to reflect in his images not only through the subjects he depicts but also through their attributes and connections – also to the viewer.
Pinky Promises – portrait in The Exhibition at Foam, Amsterdam
Connection is the first thing one could think of when entering the first exhibition gallery. Visitors are there invited to take their shoes off and walk on a carpeted floor patterned with one of Lamrabat’s portraits: Pinky Promises, which depicts a woman wearing a pink flower cone in the desert. This image is a fruit of the artist’s collaboration with Belgian designer Walter Van Beirendonck, whose work the pink cone is. Visitors are invited to feel, not only to see images. Through touch and physical proximity to his work, Lamrabat leads people to connect also physically to his works.
In the last exhibition room, visitors must walk between flags manifesting human beings in poses of love or standing alone but in dialogue with outer gazes. A feast of colors unfolds through the viewers’ eyes, and they become part of it through the continuous stimulation of traditional, framed images and more sculptural and experimental prints. Each image captures the visitors’ gaze. No matter where one is from, they will find themselves in those pictures and feel part of a world of love where beauty and humor fuse into a narrative of images taking different forms in the exhibition halls.
Diversity, racism, and women’s rights
Lamrabat’s utopia consists in a world where love is shared in diversity and the coexistence of multiple narratives. Through fashion photography, the artist brings to life his own creative spirit and vision starting from what touches him from his surroundings and history. His passion for fashion merges with contemporary social issues such as racism and refugee crises.
Diversity, racism, and women’s rights for example come out often from Lamrabat’s motivations and resulting visuals. What is presented is a world different from reality as love reigns there, through beauty and peace. It is an imagined place that Lamrabat has brought to life in the last years thanks to a continuous development of his fashion photography practice and the unfolding of matters that are meaningful to him and to his story of diasporic experience.
Mous Lamrabat on Moroccan and Western culture
Somehow personal, the artist’s utopia where differences are in harmony in the visual ecosystem shows itself as a possible world beyond cultural division. Dialogue between cultures in a shared global system is supported by the artist’s experience itself. He is at the intersection of Moroccan and Western culture, and he takes this as a blessing, as the exhibition’s title suggests. Thus, the power of these images comes from this contrast between what could be perceived as two incommunicative worlds.
Layers of meaning and cultural acceptance play with one another, and the viewer is thus in constant stimulation to look for the familiar and the other. Aesthetics invites viewers to spend time with each image as they attract the eye. Emotions then arise out of beauty. Humor adds lightness to the body of work that Lamrabat presents through Foam galleries, and it is conveyed through colors and the coexistence of djellabas and McDonald’s logos, Spongebob Squarepants and Jesus’ thorn crown among many others. The artist plays himself with familiar fashion and cultural elements and redefines them into different meanings to look for and engage with.
Thé à la Swag – Kim Kardashian’s Break the Internet image on Paper Magazine
For example, in Thé à la Swag picture he plays with the iconic image of Kim Kardashian’s Break the Internet image on Paper Magazine cover in twenty-fourteen. The woman in Lamrabat’s picture wears a niqab and abaya though while being in the same provocative position as Kardashian. Again, beauty and humor are present at the same time between different layers of connotations too to whom one might or might not connect to.
Especially when the human figures he portrays have their face covered, there is more to unveil and look for. More stories can arise, and one could then feel like being the subject of the photo themselves. The magic of Lamrabat’s photos consists thus in this ability to connect with people from different backgrounds, not without ignoring what is going on in the world in terms of social injustice and inequality. He challenges the stereotypes of the Moroccan-Muslim community which he deconstructs and shows from a different perspective: that of a person who lives shares both the worlds’ views and habits.
Mous Lamrabat’s Perspective on Fashion Photography
Fashion photography is the platform Lamrabat uses not only to express his creative potential, but also social injustices related to race, religion, and women’s rights. As fashion photography becomes more and more an art form where photographers can express their full creative potential and vision, Lamrabat has taken it as a means to communicate messages of inclusivity and love. Fashion can unify instead of divide, and so culture can. Lamrabat conveys these messages through a world he builds to give himself space to be creative and personal in the way he mediates his experiences of identity growing up Moroccan, African and Muslim in Belgium.
For Lamrabat, traditional Muslim clothes are the starting point of his narration
Niqabs, abayas, kaftan robes are indeed a constant in the images. In Slow it down a man wears a white kaftan robe but something clashes: a Nike black swoosh. In Mashallah with extra cheese a woman wears an M shaped earring which resembles the McDonald’s franchise logo. The same M is present in the form of a bright yellow bench in the first exhibition room. The ‘normal’ gets questioned in Lamrabat’s utopia.
What is normal in the end? In a globalized world, people’s cultures are the result of layers of mixing and diverse influences and Lamrabat shows that starting from his experience as a person who grew up between two cultures and their clash only provoked by racist beliefs and acts, he experienced himself. He indeed grew up Moroccan, African and Muslim in Belgium and at the same time was passionate about basketball and hip hop culture.
Lamrabat gives proof that fashion is a powerful tool to communicate urgent messages, and fashion photography can speak about social issues too: it does not have to only be in luxury publications or media but can have a place in museums and public programs too. This way it can bring together people from different professions to discuss those topics and produce other kinds of connections and solidarity.
Mous Lamrabat
Lamrabat is a self-taught photographer from Morocco. After studying interior architecture, he chose architecture as his creative means of expression. Instant creativity is thus what struck him the most about the medium. His first solo exhibition at Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam brings together his most recent work Blessings from Mousganistan, a utopia which reinvents fashion photography and tackles themes of racism, women’s rights and religion and how Moroccan culture is perceived as a clash with the Western, capitalist culture.
Foam Amsterdam
Keizersgracht 609, 1017 DS Amsterdam, Netherlands.
Foam Amsterdam is a photography museum located at Keizersgracht in Amsterdam, Netherlands. The museum showcases art, fashion and documentary photography. They always have four exhibitions on show at a time.
