seif kousmate

AS PART OF THE LOUIS ROEDERER DISCOVERY AWARD

PRESENTED BY
MUSÉE ABDERRAHMAN SLAOUI,
CASABLANCA, MOROCCO

SEIF KOUSMATE

WAHA (OASIS)

4 JULY - 28 AUGUST 2022

10.00 AM - 07.30 PM

ACCESSIBLE

TICKETING

In Waha (“oasis” in Arabic), former engineer and self-taught photographer Seif Kousmate considers his home country, Morocco, and puts his own practice into question to explore the artistic side of photography. Once agricultural hotbeds, trade hubs, and biosphere reserves, oases suffer from the overexploitation of their raw materials and are devastated by cycles of drought. Their surface area is progressively decreasing. Discouraged, the current generation is deserting them. The artist feels affected by this transformation. To express in a subtle way the degradation of these once fertile areas, he stains his images with acid and corrupts them using remnants of the local flora. Thus, content and form, subject and materiality merge to question issues of representation. Both in the photographer’s art and at the surface of the image, poetry and politics flicker, to tell the story of the ecological, economic and social reality of today’s oases.

COMMISSAIRE DE L’EXPOSITION : TAOUS DAHMANI.

SEIF KOUSMATE

Born 1988 in Essaouira, Morocco.
Lives and works in Tangier, Morocco.

A co-founder of Koz collective, Seif Kousmate is a self-taught photographer who has developed a visual vocabulary between documentary and fine art photography. After a career in the civil engineering sector, he turned towards photography in 2016. Since then, he has been working on various projects in Africa, among which the immigration of sub-Saharans on the land border between Morocco and Europe, the traditional slavery in Mauritania, the youth in Rwanda, the oasis’secosystem in Morocco. A National Geographic Explorer since 2018, he was selected as a 6x6 Global Talent Program by World Press Photo in 2020 and as a Foam Talent in 2022. His work has been exhibited in Europe and Africa and published in international newspapers and magazines.