Into the Wind, the Veils

Artist: Mehdi-Georges Lahlou

Curator:  Joseph Underwood

Curatorial Assistants: Rachel Harris, Milo Schumann

Into the Wind, the Veils is a survey of photography,  digital collage, and performance/videos by Franco-Moroccan artist Mehdi-Georges Lahlou whose themes include religiosity and queerness. Lahlou features his body, spaces, and memories to mine traditional religious motifs for their impact on individual identity and our current cultural reality. His appropriation of religious iconography challenges what we believe about Islam and Christian faith practices, and how we determine what is appropriate or taboo. Growing up between Morocco and France, to parents of Islamic and Catholic faiths, the artist began to use performance and photography to revisit memories as he pushed against anti-queer sentiments in North Africa. His work is simultaneously intimate and mysterious, foreign and familiar, and he asks the viewer to reconsider what they believe about their own identity and the identities of those around them.

Mehdi-Georges Lahlou is the forthcoming artist-in-residence at SPACES in Cleveland (June 2021) where he will mount a new, large-scale exhibition.