IN FOCUS
The Mohammed VI Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art houses one of the most important collections of Moroccan modern and contemporary art. It offers temporary exhibitions, cultural events, and museum mediation. What does the 2026 – 2027 season hold?
This year’ s program has a distinctive character, combining our focus on contemporary Moroccan art with a commitment to the African continent, again expressed through contemporary artistic practices. We are also developing partnerships with museums worldwide to organize joint exhibitions. Last season, we presented exhibitions devoted to two major Moroccan artists, Mohamed Melehi and Younès Rahmoun, as well as exhibitions exploring video art, painting, and photography. This season, we are preparing an exhibition devoted to the Moroccan photographer Daoud Aoulad-Syad in celebration of the bicentenary of photography. We chose to dedicate an exhibition to an outstanding photographer and to highlight the prominent role of photography in Moroccan art. It will feature his black-and-white photographs, which define his practice, alongside his color photographs.
How did audiences respond to these exhibitions?
They attracted many people interested in the visual arts and enabled them to engage closely with artists central to the Moroccan art scene. Younès Rahmoun is a contemporary artist with an international reputation, and we presented a large-scale installation that offered visitors a new sensory experience. The exhibition was especially popular with young people, in part because of its use of video. In contrast, the major Mohamed Melehi retrospective was based on extensive scholarly research. It traced his career from the start to the end of his life, positioning his work within a specific chapter of the art history of Morocco, North Africa, and the Middle East, while also exploring its connections with Europe and the United States. The exhibition offered detailed, academically rigorous material that enabled a wider audience to discover Melehi’ s significance in Morocco’ s artistic scene.
Beyond exhibitions, you run a diverse cultural and academic program. What are its highlights, and who does it address?
This year’ s program has been especially rich, thanks to our collaboration with the Institut national d’ histoire de l’ art( INHA) in Paris. During the Festival de l’ histoire de l’ art( Festival of Art History) in Fontainebleau, we organized meetings for doctoral students and art history researchers. The program explored the relationship between the artist and the artisan, as well as its nature. For a week, the museum hosted artists, designers, and curators, along with about fifteen students from Morocco, France, Germany, Senegal, and Cameroon, selected for their proposed projects. It was a distinctive partnership among the museum, the Fontainebleau festival, the German Center for Art History in Paris, and the Getty Foundation. We hosted part of the program in March 2026, and the program continued in Paris and later in Fontainebleau.
The program resonated with an audience we are actively cultivating: researchers, artists, and academics working in art history and at the intersection of art history, heritage, and design.
We also developed a program focused on women and cultural perspectives. With HEM, we explored the legacy of the late sociologist Fatema Mernissi at Mohammed V University in Rabat through a lecture series attended by prominent women. At the museum, we held a series of talks examining the relationship between art and women, including a conversation with artist Khadija Tnana, whose career has been deeply engaged with social and political issues.
During Ramadan evenings, we screened a selection of auteur films that drew a wide audience of Rabat’ s cinephiles. In partnership with the Embassy of Poland, we also presented films from the 1950s to the 1990s, including historical works by major directors such as Krzysztof Kieślowski and Andrzej Wajda.
In this sense, the museum has become a broader cultural and artistic space, bridging the past and the present.
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A museum is a tool for producing artistic knowledge.
What has made this broader programming possible? The museum offers generous space and the technical facilities needed to screen films to a high standard. We invited leading film critics to introduce and analyze the films and to open meaningful discussions with the audience. People enjoyed it immensely; it brought back memories of the old film-club culture. Music has been part of this, too. Indeed, we hosted classical music evenings with the Moroccan Philharmonic Orchestra, staging concerts in the museum’ s atrium, whose beauty and contemporary architecture echo Morocco’ s Moorish aesthetic. Throughout 2025 and 2026, we have deepened our relationship with the public through diverse programming, recognizing that no single audience exists. One specialized, scholarly public engages with art history. At the same time, another comes to the museum for music, beauty, cinema, literature, and ideas— and finds something of itself in everything the museum offers.
Do you run dedicated arts-education programs that bring in schoolchildren and encourage younger generations to engage with the museum and its collections?
The diversity of periods, styles, and techniques I mentioned led us to develop dedicated mediation and arts and cultural education programs in collaboration with schools and associations specializing in arts and cultural education. Every exhibition includes educational materials, including a booklet in Arabic and French. This summer, in July and August, we also ran a program of art workshops that provided a wonderful setting for children who do not have the opportunity to travel during the holidays.
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