From 29/09/2024 to 16/02/2025 the Galerie Stadt Sindelfingen shows with Aléas the first institutional solo exhibition by Hicham Berrada (*1986, in Casablanca, Morocco, lives in Roubaix, FR) in Germany. The exhibition provides an overview of the artist’s oeuvre based on newly created works and ones from previous years.
Hicham Berrada’s artistic practice resembles that of a painter whose materials are not colour and canvas, but the natural laws to which reality and all matter observes. His installations, sculptures, videos and performances are based on scientific methods, which he uses to activate the forces of ecological processes and the elements. He does not paint landscapes or poetic universes, but creates them with the help of chemical substances and physical reactions in process-related works that develop dynamically in time and space. Aléas means coincidences and the works in the exhibition visualise the random fluctuations of nature by triggering their aesthetic potential.
In the centre of the first room, an intense light emanates from a dark glass terrarium. The newly created installation Chambre climatique (2024) contains a misty garden with plants and minerals. At its centre is an indefinable creature that combines animal and plant attributes. It is surrounded by other creatures which, on closer inspection, turn out to be sculptures made of PLA (polylactic acid). They are part of a cycle initiated by the artist, which triggers the decomposition of the PLA. The man-made substances decompose into organic matter, which then further breaks down and transforms into mineral nutrients, ultimately fulfilling their original purpose of re-entering the mineral kingdom.
The two video works Les oiseaux (2014) and Celeste (2014) were created in the Villa Medici in Rome and show painterly interventions in nature. The setting of Les oiseaux is the Piazzale. The camera is focussed on a 20KW beam of light that illuminates the sky brightly. The night sky becomes a canvas on which seagulls move in circles around the artificial light source. The birds are attracted by it and become artistic actors in Berrada’s painting, who succeeds in giving the location and, above all, nature its own artistic expression.
Celeste is a life-size painting that does not manifest itself on a canvas, but as an ephemeral, immaterial image. The static camera shows the view from a window into the garden of the Villa Medici. Wisps of blue mist rise, spreading like a cloud in the sky. The artist has developed a smoking device that allows him to choose the desired colour, density and spread of the smoke.Ultimately, however, weather conditions that cannot be influenced, such as wind strength and currents, also play a significant role and leave the final result to the forces of chance.
For the Cartes mères (2021 – ongoing) series, Hicham Berrada immerses the motherboards of computers in electrolytic baths. The metals they are made of react with each other at high speed and form surreal-looking mineral landscapes in small aquariums. The artist activates and modulates just a few parameters in order to exploit the intrinsic properties of the metals and their ability to organise themselves. In this way, Berrada visualises the physical and chemical properties of matter and makes them comprehensible to the viewers.
In the Permutations (2023) video works, on the other hand, electronic circuit boards are immersed in electrolytic solutions. Once again, a metamorphosis is initiated that leads to the decay of the circuit boards and gradually dissolves them in foggy vapours. The decompositions visualise a continuous flow of energy, depicting the cycles of nature as well as the unpredictability and potential for change in the world.
In the museum’s octagonal extension, a work from Berrada’s Presage series (2007 – ongoing) is shown in an immersive 360° video installation. These processual works are as well created through controlled interventions by the artist, who adds minerals to an aqueous solution and chemically activates them. The resulting reactions form complex, colourful, constantly changing underwater worlds. By orchestrating the various components, the artist once again makes those processes visible to the human eye that it normally can’t perceive: the movement of the minerals over the course of time.
The newly created group of works Keromancies (2024) takes an old form of fortune-telling as its starting point. In keromancy melted wax is poured into cold water in order to prophesise the future with the help of the resulting forms. By exposing the waxes to clearly defined conditions, Hicham Berrada can control their moulding and metaphorically influence the future. He uses photogrammetry to create 3D scans of them and applies an algorithm to expose them to bilateral symmetry – the biological principle of form that is responsible for the appearance of humans and almost all animals and plants. Through the randomness of a simulated evolution, they face the viewer as almost life-size 3D printed wall sculptures looking like futuristic or extra- terrestrial life forms. Their symmetrical, proliferating forms offer a canvas for new perspectives that reflect the individual perception of the viewer and reveal order in chaos.
Press release from City Gallery of Sindelfingen
Image: Hicham Berrada. Celeste. 2014. Colour video 5:55 min. Grey sky, sky blue smoke. Image courtesy of the artist © ADAGP Hicham Berrada
