culture
A Figure of Abiding Charm: Mouna Ahizoune and Hamza Marmouche at IZZA
From 24 October to 15 January, new works on the unseen labour that keeps a place of hospitality running, placed across the rooms of the hotel.
- Date
24 October–15 January
Monday to Saturday, 12 to 5 pm
- Location
46 Driba Laarida, Dar IZZA, 46 Sidi Ahmed Soussi, Marrakesh 40000, Morocco
- Useful info
Opening on Saturday 24 October, 5 to 9 pm, by invitation only. Contact IZZA.
From Saturday 24 October 2026 to 15 January 2027, IZZA presents "A Figure of Abiding Charm", a duo exhibition by Mouna Ahizoune and Hamza Marmouche, curated by Aicha Benazzouz and Natasha Cox. It opens "Growing a Field", the second edition of the IZZA Associate Artist Programme, which follows the inaugural "Silos of Light" and supports a new generation of artists working in Morocco. The newly presented works span performance, moving image, sculpture, painting and drawing. The title is borrowed from David Foster Wallace, who used it for the kind of service that keeps a place of hospitality running so smoothly that the people doing the work all but disappear from view.
The exhibition follows that figure, whether the artist, a guest, a woman at work, a mother or a family member, through labour that is expected to stay invisible, at home or in a hotel corridor. The works carry the marks of the hands and processes that made them, and they are placed within the fabric of the building itself: alone in some rooms, up close in others.
Mouna Ahizoune
Ahizoune grew up in a small village in the Middle Atlas, watching the women around her repeat the same gestures of domestic labour, and her work leans the body into the question of whose labour goes unnoticed. In Mama Sisyphe she tries to dry the sea by hand, sweeping the waves as they come in; in a new performance, Golden Feet, her body moves from water to another state, carrying gold flecks on her feet. Hand-built ceramics, cut through with schist she gathers in Aïn Leuh, and a series of underwater films complete her part of the show.
Hamza Marmouche
Marmouche, a painter working between abstraction and figuration, moves here towards sculpture. His wooden paintings are held by a hidden magnetic system and can be rearranged by hand, so the composition never quite settles, and his welded steel sculptures, based on an abstract ladybug-shaped form that has run through his paintings since his earliest work, keep their welds, cuts and grinding marks in view.
