"For his fourth solo exhibition at the Analix Forever gallery in Geneva, Mounir Fatmi explores this time the question of illusion.
In February 2015, fatmi, in Permanent Exiles, presented at MAMCO (Geneva) a work entitled Constructing Illusion (2015): a steel sculpture with a system of mirrors such as those used by medical researchers interested in the analysis and treatment of the "phantom limb". This phenomenon refers to the persistent sensation of the presence of a limb after it has been amputated: the brain "remembers" and recreates the non-existent limb. Visitors to the exhibition can test their own perceptions by inserting one of their arms into the mirror sculpture.
The name of this sculpture then became the title of the Analix Forever exhibition: Constructing Illusion. Fatmi expands the concept of the brain as a factory for physical illusions to that of a factory for multiple illusions, in particular religious ones, and explores these illusions with absolute aesthetic rigor.
The experience of the lost limb, the phantom limb and then the reconstituted limb, multiplied by the mirror and by elegant photographs, both concrete and allusive. The illusion becomes reality.
Another fundamental emotion in mounir fatmi’s work: that of the link. The link, often represented by cables. Cables that should allow us to communicate but that are, in Fatmi's works, most often found, such as the “cultural umbilical cord”, fragmented. The question then is that of recreating these links, a process on which Fatmi is constantly working, not without warning us: what claims to be a link, when it is not love, can become a cord, and can enclose, separate, threaten, exclude. Who needs a God Triangle? fatmi asks us with two bas-relief paintings.
Two videos complete the exhibition: The Silence of Saint Peter Martyr (2011) and Architecture Now (2010). The first creates a trap for the viewer, because the beauty of Fatmi's images fascinates. But they are also illusions, while the criticism of the idea that faith justifies the torture of non-believers is also perceived and above all heard, even though the Saint orders us to remain silent. The second, Architecture Now, shows the systematic destruction of unwelcome buildings and leaves us stunned by the phantasmagoria of architectural phantom limbs that resemble now, too, illusions from the past."
