Enter #12/Moussem Collection : Being Places, Randa Maroufi
Randa Maroufi is a visual artist and filmmaker. She is inspired by people and their interactions on the street, in squares and in parks. A human being is a social animal that naturally seeks company. Mutual contacts are always accompanied by codes of conduct, patterns and routes. Maroufi observes these and then creates new images that explore the boundary between fiction and reality. She follows young people who are hanging around aimlessly in an abandoned, neglected theme park in Casablanca (Le Park, 2015). In Stand-by-office (2017), we see men in tailored suits walking around and interacting with colleagues in an office building in Amsterdam. They turned out to be refugees who had found temporarily ‘squatted’ accommodation in a municipality in West-Amsterdam. Today the refugees have left the building and it serves once again as counter. The film acts like a witness of this short intermezzo and specifically poses certain questions. What is false and what is true? Randa Maroufi uses strategies that are reminiscent of documentary genres, but on closer inspection the photographic and cinematic images prove to be staged. The people in the picture become characters. They are placed in the public sphere as pawns. Every detail in the image plays a role in the atmosphere created by the artist. Not a single pixel is left unused or uncontrolled. Although Maroufi mainly makes static and very slow images, they are anything but boring. The images are full of information that we do not want to miss. At the same time, we are overcome by a sense of uneasiness. Something is wrong. What is going on? With her work, the artist deliberately touches on a number of social themes, such as gender inequality and migration. She plays with our prejudice as well as our desire for stimuli and entertainment.
Randa Maroufi is invited by Mu.ZEE and Moussem to exhibit as part of ENTER. In Being Places, the artist brings together a number of recent works: Les Intruces (2018-2019), the film Bab Sebta (2019) and Diwana (2018-2020).
