Name: Marrakech Biennale
Location: Marrakech

Marrakech Biennale

The Moroccan contemporary art biennial founded 2005 by Vanessa Branson as a privately-philanthropically-funded contemporary art biennial in the historic Marrakech medina — six editions through 2016, and a continuing institutional pause since that constitutes one of the open institutional questions in the North African contemporary art conversation.

Established2005 — 20166 editions · continuing pause

The privately-funded biennial that could not continue

Across six editions and eleven years, the Marrakech Biennale established itself as a major North African contemporary art biennial. Then, in 2018, it could not continue. The reasons matter, and the institutional question continues to.

By the Biennale Editorial Team

The Marrakech Biennale was founded in 2005 by Vanessa Branson — the British art dealer and philanthropist (sister of Richard Branson) whose Marrakech institutional presence had begun with her 2002 acquisition of El Fenn, a multi-building Marrakech riad complex that she restored and operated as a boutique hotel-and-cultural-venue in the historic Marrakech medina — and Mohamed Amine Kabbaj, the Moroccan businessman and cultural patron whose continuing Marrakech philanthropic position anchored the Moroccan institutional side of the founding partnership. The 1st edition opened in 2005 under the title Arts in Marrakech (AIM Festival) and constituted the first edition of what would become, across subsequent editions, the Marrakech Biennale. The founding institutional argument was that the Moroccan contemporary art conversation — anchored by the post-1960s Moroccan modernist generation around Mohamed Melehi, Farid Belkahia, and the Casablanca School of Fine Arts (École des Beaux-Arts de Casablanca), and extended through the post-1990s Moroccan contemporary art generation including Yto Barrada, Mounir Fatmi, Hassan Hajjaj, Hicham Berrada, and subsequent generations — deserved a North African contemporary art biennial of international institutional ambition.

The Marrakech Biennale's founding institutional architecture was distinctive. The biennial programmed across the historic Marrakech medina — a UNESCO World Heritage Site, eleventh-to-sixteenth-century walled city of continuing residential and commercial use — and used the historic riads, palaces, and city sites as commission venues. The El Bahia Palace, the Dar Si Said Museum, the Palais Bahia, the Koutoubia Mosque district, and the network of historic riads (including the El Fenn that Branson operated) constituted the commission-site network. The venue model shaped the curatorial premise: the commissioned and presented work had to engage the historic Marrakech architectural and cultural context, and the relationship between the commissioned contemporary art and the continuing historic-and-living Marrakech medina became the subject of the biennial's curatorial work across its editions.

The 2nd Marrakech Biennale (2007), 3rd (2009), and 4th (2012) extended the institutional architecture across the Moroccan contemporary art conversation of the period. The 4th Marrakech Biennale (2012), Higher Atlas / Au-delà de l'Atlas, was curated by Carson Chan and Nadim Samman with international institutional ambition and marked the institutional moment at which the Marrakech Biennale entered the international biennial conversation as a peer to the post-2000 North African and Middle Eastern biennial conversation. The 5th Marrakech Biennale (2014), Where Are We Now?, was curated by the Dutch-Moroccan curator Hicham Khalidi and extended the Moroccan contemporary art conversation through commissioned work by Moroccan, Maghrebi, and international contemporary artists. The 6th Marrakech Biennale (24 February – 8 May 2016), Not New Now, was curated by Reem Fadda — the Palestinian curator, formerly Associate Curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation's Abu Dhabi Project (2010–2016) — and established the 2016 edition as the curatorially-most-acclaimed of the Marrakech Biennale's institutional history.

The 7th Marrakech Biennale was scheduled for 2018. It did not open. Across the 2017–2018 period, the Marrakech Biennale Foundation encountered institutional difficulties — financial difficulties (the private-philanthropic funding base could not sustain the institutional scale the biennial had developed across its six editions), organisational difficulties (leadership transitions, staff departures, governance restructuring), and broader institutional difficulties whose details were not made fully public by the Foundation but were discussed across the Moroccan and international art press of the period. The 7th Marrakech Biennale was postponed in early 2018 and has not opened since. The Marrakech Biennale Foundation has continued to exist institutionally — in a diminished operational state — but the biennial as a continuing institutional event has not held an edition since the 6th in 2016.

The Marrakech contemporary art conversation has continued across the 2016–2025 pause through alternative institutional infrastructure. The 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair (which operates in Marrakech across editions, beginning 2018), the Comptoir des Mines Galerie (Marrakech contemporary art gallery), the Voice Gallery (Marrakech), the Galerie 38 (Casablanca), the network of Moroccan and Marrakech-resident contemporary art institutions, and the post-2018 Moroccan international contemporary art presence at Venice, Documenta, the Sharjah Biennial, and other international biennials continues. What has not continued is the Marrakech Biennale itself as a regular institutional event.

The continuing institutional question is whether the Marrakech Biennale will return, and in what institutional form. The private-philanthropically-funded biennial model that the Marrakech Biennale Foundation operated across the six editions proved to be institutionally fragile under post-2016 conditions. Whether a different institutional model — state-supported, municipally-supported, differently-philanthropically-supported — can produce a continuing Marrakech contemporary art biennial in the post-2025 period is a question that the Moroccan cultural-policy conversation has continued to engage but has not yet answered.

The institutional architecture

The Marrakech Biennale was organised by the Marrakech Biennale Foundation, a Moroccan non-profit cultural foundation established in conjunction with the 1st edition (2005) and restructured across subsequent editions. Continuing institutional support across the six editions came from private philanthropic sources (anchored by the Branson and Kabbaj family philanthropic commitments), Moroccan state cultural-policy support (limited compared to the Egyptian state's support of the Cairo Biennale), international cultural-institutional partners (Institut français, the French Cultural Institute network, the post-2010 international foundation philanthropy in North African contemporary art), and corporate-philanthropic support. The reliance on the private-philanthropic funding base is the structural fact on which the post-2016 institutional question turns.

When the privately-funded biennial reaches its institutional limit

The Marrakech Biennale’s 2018 cancellation and continuing pause is, on the structural reading, the institutional moment at which the privately-philanthropically-funded biennial model reached its institutional limit in the post-2010 international biennial conversation. The reading is worth developing because the Marrakech episode is not unique — the 2020s biennial conversation has included parallel institutional crises at the RIBOCA (Riga), the Yinchuan Biennale, the Sharjah Biennial 13 (the 2009 Jack Persekian dismissal episode at a different scale), and the Bahia Biennial's continuing institutional difficulties — and the structural question the Marrakech episode registers applies to the broader post-2000 generation of privately-philanthropically-funded biennials.

The structural argument is that the privately-philanthropically-funded biennial model depends on sustained institutional commitments from a small number of principal funders — family philanthropic commitments, individual philanthropic commitments, corporate philanthropic commitments — that are not, by structural design, institutionally durable across timescales beyond the founding philanthropic generation's continuing engagement. The state-funded biennial model (Venice, the Bienal de São Paulo, Gwangju, the Bienal de La Habana, Dak'Art) has state-institutional commitments that survive individual personnel transitions, political transitions, and generational transitions — at institutional cost in state-cultural-policy alignment, but with institutional durability. The privately-philanthropically-funded biennial model has curatorial flexibility, institutional ambition, and international institutional visibility — at cost in institutional durability across generational transitions of the principal funders.

The Marrakech Biennale Foundation’s 2017–2018 institutional difficulties registered the structural vulnerability. The founding philanthropic generation's sustained institutional commitment had anchored the biennial across six editions and eleven years; when that commitment could no longer sustain the institutional scale the biennial had developed, the institutional architecture could not be sustained through alternative institutional mechanisms. The Moroccan state's cultural-policy investment in the Marrakech Biennale was insufficient to carry the biennial across the 2018 institutional transition; the Moroccan corporate-philanthropic conversation did not produce alternative principal funders willing to commit at the institutional scale required; the international foundation-philanthropic conversation did not extend its post-2010 institutional commitments to North African contemporary art at the scale required to carry the Marrakech Biennale through the transition.

What the post-2016 Moroccan contemporary art conversation demonstrates is that the continuing Moroccan contemporary art conversation does not depend on the Marrakech Biennale as a continuing institutional event. The Moroccan contemporary art generation continues to exhibit internationally at scale; the Marrakech contemporary art scene continues across alternative institutional infrastructure; the 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair’s Marrakech editions constitute one of the replacement institutional anchors of the post-2018 Marrakech international contemporary art conversation. What has not survived is the particular institutional argument the Marrakech Biennale made — contemporary art at international biennial scale, programmed across the historic Marrakech medina, organised through a privately-philanthropically-funded foundation. Whether that institutional argument returns, and in what institutional form, is the continuing institutional question of the Moroccan contemporary art conversation.

Founder · 2005

Vanessa Branson

British art dealer, philanthropist, and cultural patron (b. 1959). Sister of Richard Branson. Founding co-founder of the Marrakech Biennale (2005) with Mohamed Amine Kabbaj. Founder and continuing operator of El Fenn, the Marrakech riad complex (acquired 2002, operated as a boutique hotel-and-cultural-venue in the historic Marrakech medina). Continuing institutional position within the Marrakech philanthropic-and-cultural conversation. Author of One Hundred Summers (2021).

Source: Wikipedia

Co-founder · 2005

Mohamed Amine Kabbaj

Moroccan businessman and cultural patron. Co-founder of the Marrakech Biennale (2005) with Vanessa Branson. Continuing Marrakech philanthropic position anchored the Moroccan institutional side of the founding partnership. Continuing role within the Moroccan philanthropic and cultural-policy conversation.

Source: Marrakech Biennale Foundation archive

Curator · 6th Marrakech Biennale (2016)

Reem Fadda

Palestinian curator and writer. Curator of the 6th Marrakech Biennale (2016, Not New Now). Associate Curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation's Abu Dhabi Project (2010–2016) — institutional position in the post-2010 international curatorial conversation about contemporary Middle Eastern and African art. Subsequent role as Director of the Cultural Foundation, Abu Dhabi (2020–).

Source: Wikipedia

Moroccan modernist precursor

Mohamed Melehi & the Casablanca School

Moroccan modernist painter (1936–2020). Founding figure of the Casablanca School (École des Beaux-Arts de Casablanca) post-1960s Moroccan modernist generation with Farid Belkahia, Mohamed Chabâa, Bert Flint, and the post-independence Moroccan modernist conversation. Continuing institutional position within the Moroccan contemporary art conversation that the Marrakech Biennale platformed. The post-2018 international rediscovery of the Casablanca School (Tate St Ives exhibition 2019, international institutional engagement) shapes the Moroccan contemporary art conversation.

Source: Wikipedia

Post-1990s Moroccan generation

Yto Barrada, Mounir Fatmi, Hassan Hajjaj, Hicham Berrada

Internationally-visible post-1990s Moroccan contemporary art generation. Yto Barrada (b. 1971) — international exhibition history including the 2011 Deutsche Bank Artist of the Year, Cinémathèque de Tanger institutional founding. Mounir Fatmi (b. 1970) — conceptual practice across the post-2000 international contemporary art conversation. Hassan Hajjaj (b. 1961) — photographic practice across the post-2000 international art-fashion-and-cultural conversation. Hicham Berrada (b. 1986) — younger-generation Moroccan international practice.

Source: Wikipedia · Barrada

Organising body