This online screening is presented in partnership with presented in collaboration with Alserkal Arts Foundation and Museum of Contemporary African Art Al Maaden (MACAAL).
When the retrospective Mohamed Melehi: Recent Paintings opened at New York’s Bronx Museum of the Arts in 1984, it was the first large-scale solo exhibition in the US for an artist from North Africa. A landmark in Melehi’s artistic trajectory, the exhibition gave the artist an opportunity to reconnect with the American art scene, which he had experienced so vividly between 1962 and 1964. In an attempt to highlight the importance of this event, the Bronx Museum commissioned American video artist Shalom Gorewitz to produce a documentary film about Melehi.
Filmed in Morocco, MELEHI sees Gorewitz and Melehi return to the artist’s most remarkable site-specific and ‘integrated’ artworks, as well as to the traditional mosques of the High Atlas where Melehi documented outstanding decorative paintings and unanticipated vernacular modernism. In doing so, Gorewitz captures Melehi’s universe and iconography in this truly artistic, and lively film.
The screening will be followed by an event The Reunion | MELEHI AND GOREWITZ on Friday, 9 October. More than 35 years after they last met, filmmaker Shalom Gorewitz and Mohamed Melehi will reunite for a special live conversation, exclusively on alserkal.online, moderated by curator Morad Montazami.