Exhibiting Internationally: What Art Fairs Taught Me About the Universality of Art

Every international fair is a verification exercise. You arrive with your works, your aesthetic certainties, your cultural references — and you confront them with a public that does not share the same references, the same habits of looking, the same expectations. It is an exercise in simultaneous humility and discovery. Since my first international participation at 1-54 London in 2023, I have had the opportunity to test my works in Abu Dhabi, Paris, Amsterdam and Marrakech. Each context has been different, and each difference has taught me something about what art can and cannot traverse.

The first lesson is that works that 'cross' cultural borders are those with a strong physical presence. At Abu Dhabi Art Fair, in the context of Eclectica Contemporary's booth, I observed that visitors — many of whom came from cultural backgrounds very different from mine — responded first to the painting as a sensory experience: the colour, the surface, the way light changed according to the angle of vision. Intellectual understanding of the cultural context of the work came after, if it came at all. What caught the eye was the physical presence, unequal, irreducible to an explanation.

The second lesson is that the exhibition context profoundly modifies the reception of the work. The same canvas, placed in a fair booth alongside very different works, amid the noise and agitation of an opening day, speaks differently than in a silent gallery, perfectly lit, where the viewer takes time to stop. I have had to learn to anticipate these contextual differences in the way I prepare hangings, choose which works to present in which type of space.

The third lesson, perhaps the most important, concerns the cultural identity of the work. I sometimes feared that my references — the Casablanca School, the Arab-Berber geometric tradition, the light of Morocco — would constitute an obstacle to international reception. I discovered the contrary: it is precisely the cultural singularity of these works that elicits the deepest interest. International collectors and institutions are not looking for interchangeable, deculturated works conforming to a rootless international style. They seek works that have something to say that cannot be said otherwise — a specific perspective on the world, anchored in a particular experience and capable of speaking beyond it.

This is perhaps what universality in art means: not the erasure of what is particular, but the capacity of the particular to touch the universal. A work that speaks from a singular experience — Moroccan, African, contemporary, linked to a certain way of seeing light and matter — can touch someone in Tokyo, São Paulo or Oslo, precisely because it does not try to speak to everyone in the same way. It speaks from where it is, with everything that place implies, and that is what gives it its power.

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