Kissing Circles

A year after his last exhibition in Geneva (May 2013), and a year before his upcoming solo show at the MAMCO (spring 2015), mounir fatmi is back in Geneva, this time with a set of photographs and a book all about a kiss.

The kiss is an extraordinarily rich subject in the history of art, from Antiquity to the Renaissance, from Fragonard to Rodin, from Munch to Magritte, from Klimt to Picasso, from Brancusi to Witkin, from Warhol to Ange Leccia... But what inspired fatmi, even more than the art of the kiss or the kiss in art, and even more than the ultra-famous kiss between Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, is the way the scientist Frederick Soddy, winner of a Nobel Prize for chemistry, approached the matter, in revisiting Descartes’ theorem on the ways in which circles and spheres osculate and the tangents that result.
He published a poem about these interfaces in a 1936/1937 issue of the journal Nature. Like a science of desire.

In the exhibition “Kissing Circles,” mounir fatmi presents a photographic series inspired by the kiss in the film Casablanca, a series he has been working on for several years, and perhaps, unconsciously, ever since his childhood, when he first lived in Casablanca, and the kiss… In fatmi’s kisses a thousand references converge, notably the kiss that recently excited two young lovers in Morocco and the whole of their country with them, implicitly asking these questions: are a kiss and its representation to be condemned? Should they be censored? And a thousand obsessions, too: fatmi’s obsession with beauty, with black and white, with archives, science and poetry.

“The Kissing Precise,”* writes mounir fatmi, “connects a Hollywood kiss and the film of my adolescence with my combined obsessions with mastery and poetry, including a winner of a Nobel Prize for Chemistry, a geometry of feelings, a surprising poem about circles touching and, finally, two young Moroccans who, with their love, threw a whole society into tumult, and the world in which I live. Yes, everything is desire, everything is poetry, everything is science, everything is art and, finally, everything is politics.”

* The title of the book accompanying the exhibition, with texts by Régis Durand and Barbara Polla.