Artists: Sergey Bratkov, Elshan Ghasimi, Ben Greber, Markus Hoffmann, Michal Martychowiec, Patrick Panetta, Max Schaffer, Stark & Shakupa
Curators: Eleonora Frolov und JMH Schindele
Welcome to the exhibition "New Memories (El Arbi Bouqdib Archive)," the sixth part of the exhibition series MYTHOPOESIS. This exhibition explores various forms and artistic positions in contemporary 'myth-making.'
This multi-author project features two filmmakers, a classical Persian composer, a sculptor, a systematic Neo-Romantic, and a conceptual artist. They were invited to engage with the material and immaterial legacy of the Moroccan-Berber mathematician, poet, cyberpunk, numerologist, and Quran scholar El Arbi Bouqdib (*1947 – †2016), creating new works.
El Arbi, also known as Elie Bouqdib, was a multifaceted personality representing the fascinating figure of an outsider researcher and hermit. Born in Morocco, he passed away in Bremen in 2016. His life and work spanned several continents, uniting seemingly polar opposites such as rationality and faith, physics and metaphysics, mathematics and magic. The El Arbi Bouqdib Archive (EBA) was established in 2017, and its physical collection is located in Bremen. The idea of transferring Bouqdib's legacy into a conceptual archive, preserving it, and opening it up to a collective process across various disciplines and media was initiated by JMH Schindele, together with Bouqdib's son Joseph Bouqdib, who co-manages the archive.
A central theoretical interest of the exhibition, and the EBA in general, is not only the actual mythopoetic processes and acts of experimental, poetic biography but also the introduction of a second-order observation. By comparing and contrasting different artistic and media forms and methods, a (modernist) self-reflection on 'the conditions of the possibilities' of memory work is established, constantly intensifying. The fact that Bouqdib worked in obscurity throughout his life is essential. Thus, each new artwork, every song, and every line—this text itself—is a 'New Memory' of an unknown hermeticist and a subjective-poetic (re-)construction of his cosmos.
In keeping with Bouqdib's life, where he spent much time in laboratories, this exhibition—situated in an artist's studio—also takes on the character of a laboratory with an exploratory nature. Fourteen works, most of which were created or completed in recent months, weave a dense yet fragmentary network: stars appear as a sudden motif. Geometric forms and a cosmic dimension, expansions into the infinitely large and small. Unplanned, grown, and brought together for this exhibition as a hermeneutic dance around Bouqdib and the endless theme of memory. Number sequences present themselves in various manifestations, codes to be deciphered, and numerological temptations. The question of the 'ontological' status of what is found (e.g., whether it is art, a sacred object) arises in different facets of the works and processed forms.
More information about the artworks (in German)
Floor plan and list of works
