BRUSSELS.- For her first collaboration with MLF l Marie-Laure Fleisch, Hanane El Farissi proposes the solo project In the Way of Transmuting. Graduated from the HISK, her sculptural work, installations and performances start from objects and everyday gestures. Individual development, what defines them and memory are the driving forces of her artistic approach. Through diverse mediums, she uses stereotypes and methods of representation, as well as trivial or anecdotal depictions, to question the values that define our contemporary way of thinking.

Hanane El Farissi’s practice may be seen as an endlessly exploration. Inspired by the most ordinary details surrounding us, the artist extracts evidences of human violence. This research, based on daily life but also influenced by Art History, aims to reveal our identity and our past. It takes place through the distortion of existing objects, giving birth to hybrid artworks with multiple meanings. Thus, these creations convey a story, both contemporary and historical, but also an ambiguity. This ambivalence in El Farissi’s work highlights contradictions in order to help ourselves thinking about our societies.

In her drawings made with diluted backgrounds, blue pen and gold leaf details, El Farissi often draws portions of architectures. Playing with different temporalities when she carries out her iconographic researches, the artist seeks for traumas humankind has been through in history, the ones which have transformed our cities. The innocent aspect of the works actually represents past events when human intervention has always something to do with madness, and shows how it permanently impacted our present. This multilayered representation gives us look at violence, its mechanisms as well as its representation through time.

A second body of works consists of sculptures representing books. Made in lead and gold leaf, the artist refers to the philosopher’s stone which transforms base metals - here coupled with drawings and poetry - into gold. Oscillating between word, image and matter, the artist wishes to uproot the initial concept in order to give it a form of spirituality and a new reasoning. El Farissi’s representation of brutality is made with delicacy and sensibility, just like the fine blue lines, almost trembling, of her drawings. The intention is not to demonstrate the violence of our species - this is no longer to prove – but rather trying to understand how to rebuild ourselves from our ruins.