Mouhcine Rahaoui

MOUHCINE RAHAOUI WAS BORN IN 1990 IN JERADA, MOROCCO. HE LIVES AND WORKS IN MARRAKECH.

Mouhcine Rahaoui graduated from the Tetouan School of Fine Arts in 2017. His work explores the experience and history of miners in the Oriental region, particularly in his home town of Jerada. He offers an immersion into the meanders of his memory and his relationship with the raw reality of a town where the only way to survive is to 'take the rabbit trail', confronting the likelihood of not getting out. According to urban legend, a Belgian forest ranger stumbled upon a coal deposit in the late 1920s after having followed a black rabbit covered in coal. This event led to the first mining operations in the town of Jerada.

Mouhcine Rahaoui questions the absurdity of life in its unreasonable and unfair nature. The mine confirms humans' fragility in the face of the unpredictability of the mountain that feeds them and sometimes swallows them up. Mouhcine Rahaoui tells the story of these dangerous, clandestine expeditions to extract the coal that sustains life and gently consumes it. Mouhcine Rahaoui wonders why working there, in Jerada, leads to death rather than life.

Through a series of reproductions, installations and ready-mades, cataloguing the miner's tools - torches, helmets, gloves, ropes - in a dominant shade of black, Mouhcine Rahaoui plunges the viewer into the aesthetics of the worker and informs us, through a visceral gesture, of his fate, sealed by the mine like an immutable destiny.

Mouhcine Rahaoui's work has been the subject of two solo exhibitions: one at the Comptoir des Mines Gallery in Marrakech in 2022 and the other at AFIKARIS Gallery in 2024. It has also been shown at Art Paris, 1-54 London and artgenève.