Artist in Focus: Ghita Skali
Artist on LI-MA's radar
At LI-MA, artists are at the heart of everything we do. Therefore, each month, we put the spotlight on an artist and their body of work.
This month, immerse yourself in the works of Ghita Skali.
Read our interview with Ghita Skali on Mediakunst.net.
Born in Casablanca, Ghita Skali studied at Villa Arson in Nice and attended the postgraduate programmes of the Fine Arts academy in Lyon in 2016 and De Ateliers in Amsterdam from 2018 to 2020. Ghita Skali’s work takes as an initial impulse investigations around anecdotes which appeared in the media and have been later forgotten and/or erased, for example the construction of an Eiffel Tower in Fez in Morocco, the imprisonment of a spy duck in Cairo, a suspicious cardiological device invented by the king Hassan II, the donkey tails of Rita McBride's sculpture stolen by the inhabitants of Monchengladbach in Germany or the declaration in 2014 of an Egyptian general of the Army pretending he invented a miraculous machine curing Aids.
These intrigues and anecdotes left only fleeting traces but they reveal power relations based on mythologies, the reification of fictions and assumptions. They manifest many systems of belief and authority but also irony. Ghita Skali borrows, among others, the codes of the street interview, the conference, the documentary, the guided tour or the medical congress. In her approach, it is less a question of the truth of the anecdote than about mapping out all the possible ramifications of this narration, the contradictions and dead ends of the many rumours that made it. Her projects have been shown at été 78 (Brussels), Project Space Festival (Berlin), Beirut Art Fair, Triangle (Marseille),18 (Marrakech), Cube Independent Art Space (Rabat), Cairo Off Biennale, Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo (Torino) and at Palais de Tokyo (Paris).
Ghita Skali was also nominated for the Prix de Rome Visual Arts 2023, creating work displayed for the prize at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. In this new work, Skali criticises the exclusionary selection procedure of art prizes – and specifically that of the Prix de Rome.
Header image: still from NATUURLIJK (2023) by Ghita Skali
Thumbnail image: portrait of Ghita Skali by Henna HyvaÌrinen
