“Marrakech is one of these places where you don’t have to look for inspiration. It’s always there, it always reaches you,” said Mous Lamrabat in an interview with Artsy. The Moroccan-born, Belgian-raised photographer is known for his sleek, fashion-inspired photographs that channel Morocco’s rich cultural tapestry into iconic visual narratives. In his forthcoming solo show “Homesick,” on view at Loft Art Gallery’s Marrakech space during this year’s edition of 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair, Lamrabat delves into his longing to preserve a connection to his native country.
With its bustling medina, skilled artisans, and historic buildings, Marrakech has plenty to recommend it to visitors. Additionally, in the past year, the city has established itself as a growing art hub, fueled by an expanding gallery scene and 1-54, which runs through February 2nd. In his Loft Art Gallery show, the East-meets-West underpinning of Lamrabat’s work mirrors the broader ambition of the city to showcase contemporary African art on a global stage.
Since his first solo exhibition in 2019, Lamrabat has cemented his status as a first-rate image maker and storyteller. Drawing inspiration from the pride he observes in his countrymen, his images reconcile and celebrate his mixed heritage, intertwining cultural roots with a broader narrative of identity and belonging. Having spent the past decade building a successful commercial profile in Europe by shooting fashion editorials in GQ and Vogue, Lamrabat considers this latest collection of images––shot over a three-week period in the vast, moonlike plateaus of Agafay, just south of Marrakech––a homecoming of sorts.
“Half of my brain is Western creative thinking and the other half is African, but it’s not necessarily split down the middle,” he told Artsy. “It’s more like a labyrinth of tastes and thinking patterns that flow through one another. It’s a big messy place but the only one that needs to find structure in it is me.”
Fascinated with iconography and material culture, Lamrabat dissolves and reinvents cultural codes by mixing them with elements of pop culture. The photograph The United States of Amazigh (2023), for example, is a striking cultural composite. Lamrabat’s subject, dressed in a traditional kandora dress, fez, and novelty glasses, assumes the position of the Statue of Liberty. Against a desert landscape, he lifts a large piece of Berber jewellery—known as a fibula, representing home or family—to the sky.
Western cultural cues often make appearances across Lamrabat’s work. In National Treasure (2024), also included in the show, a model bathed in cobalt hues stares down the lens while wearing a necklace of Laughing Cow cheese triangles. “Growing up in Europe, it felt like a logo represented a certain status, but we were too broke to have anything that was branded,” the photographer said. “Later, I realized that was the best thing that could have happened to me because it meant we had to get creative at a very young age.” Even something as seemingly artless as small, branded triangles of cheese hold profound symbolism, serving as what Lamrabat describes as cross-cultural “touchstones.”
In Morocco, he said, this specific cheese has a cultural cachet. “Moroccans put this stuff on everything,” he laughed. “In the morning, they’ll have a traditional breakfast of eggs and olive oil but with a piece of Laughing Cow cheese.…Beautiful things happen when we celebrate the things that bring us together and make us different.”
During regular visits to Marrakech’s souks, seeking new imagery to adopt into his visuals, Lamrabat is guided by an internal compass that draws him to specific objects. “They call out to me, as if suddenly illuminated by spotlights,” he told Artsy. “This sensation extends beyond the souks to the streets, the landscapes, and even the artisans at work. It feels almost magical. Certain objects, places, or movements seem imbued with genius and I become obsessed by this genius, which opens up a conversation between what’s around me and what sparks something within me.”
The star on the Moroccan flag, for example, a powerful national symbol, returns as a recurring motif throughout this series of images. It’s a sacred “logo” of sorts, serving as a bridge between nostalgia and hope, between the concept of elsewhere and the grounding notion of home.
Beyond this emblem, Lamrabat’s images are unified by a compositional framing and elemental harmony borrowed from the Berber flag. “Generally, I really like symmetry,” Lamrabat explained. “But with these works specifically, I was inspired by the three horizontal lines of the flag and their colors, which represent the sand, the mountains, and the sky. The central symbol, representing a body or person, occupies all three of these territories.” In the flag, the figure’s head remains in the top third of the composition, a positioning Lamrabat mirrors in his own photographs, where his subjects’ heads are shown against the sky.
“With this body of work, I was guided by curiosity and wanting to rediscover a sense of freedom,” the artist said. “What would happen if I took some time back for myself? Would the images still work? Where am I at creatively? Would I have lost it?”
As his latest show proves, he certainly hasn’t lost it. The photographs comprising “Homesick”embody a resolutely contemporary vision at once deeply personal yet universal. In these brilliant, surreal compositions, where tradition meets modernity and religion meets consumerism, Lamrabat gives shape to the complexity of origin and richness of the diasporic experience.
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