Take a Seat, Have Some Tea Sara Ouhaddou

Invited as the second guest of the Fondation Thalie’s summer programme in Arles, Sara Ouhaddou (born in 1986 in Draguignan) is a Franco-Moroccan artist who lives and works between Paris and Marrakech. This solo exhibition brings together a selection of recent works, some of which are shown for the first time, and bear witness to a protean artistic practice inspired by traditional crafts and cultures.

For almost a decade, Sara Ouhaddou has been working with mainly Moroccan communities to produce works that reinterpret ancestral techniques in glass, ceramics, weaving, and embroidery. From the Atlas Mountains to the villages of the Rif, from the medinas of Fez to Marrakech, the artist draws on the collective intelligence of local and rural communities to define protocols that deconstruct motifs and innovate by imagining new tools. Each workshop is a social, political, economic, and geographical study. Every one of her pieces is a learning experience, an exchange of knowledge and stories, both intimate and universal.

The title of the exhibition, “Take a Seat, Have Some Tea” [in Arabic: Gaalsi, T’charbi kass d’atay], is an invitation to meet the communities that Sara Ouhaddou collaborates with. A series of photographs captured in Morocco, Tunisia, and Japan are presented here for the first time. These images of workshops, contexts, atmospheres, colours, and textures that were taken over the years are the starting point for the development of her works in glass, ceramics, and textiles which are presented in the exhibition.

Between photography and sculptural works, a certain long-form poetry becomes clear; a way of seeing the world against the injunctions of globalisation, thanks to an ecology of reuse that the artist includes within a resolutely contemporary plastic approach.