Painter and sculptor Farid Belkahia (1934-2014) was the director of the Casablanca Art School from 1962 to 1974, a pioneer of Moroccan and African modern art, and a major f igure for Global South studies and postcolonial art history.

After he travelled the world – from Paris, where he studied at École nationale des Beaux Arts, to Prague, where he met with communist artists such as Pablo Neruda and Paul Éluard – his work took a radical turn by the mid-1960s. He then concentrated his efforts on debunking the Western painting apparatus, resorting instead to copper, animal skin, or shaped and decorated frames. His work combines influences of Arabic calligraphy, Amazigh alphabet, and archetypal and multicultural geometries. In his “shaped canvas” technique, he uses animal skin instead of canvas and henna dye instead of oil paint. Belkahia’s deep connection to Amazigh and African popular arts resonates in his statement: “Tradition is the future of Man.”¹

The profoundness of his visual, symbolic, and semantic research and exploration leads us to see his work as a kind of either esoteric or talismanic modernism – an art of transcribing ancient or sacred languages and pictograms (with a specific role for Sufi-related elements) into a new modernized and somehow Pan-African system of signs in migration (in which the influence of Paul Klee and the Bauhaus can still be deciphered).

The work Composition (1996), presented in the Bienal, can be related to different cycles of Belkahia’s shaped canvas or relief paintings, blending anthropomorphic and abstract forms, such as Féminité [Femininity] (1980), Transe [Trance] (1986), Procession (1996), or Main [Hand] (1980). As one can see, his language of signs and symbols takes on quite erotic and sexual connotations and shapes, as a great number of his skin paintings, undergoing a striking process of eroticized abstraction and emancipation of a transsexual body through the artwork.

After two years as a very young Casablanca Art School director, Belkahia expanded his vision: between 1964 and 1965 he appointed Mohamed Melehi and Mohammed Chabâa as visual arts professors, alongside Toni Maraini and Bert Flint for art history courses. Together they led the most compelling pedagogic revolution in Morocco’s post-independence era, known as the Casablanca Art School, receiving wide attention in the field of postcolonial art history and in global museums nowadays.

In 1987 Farid Belkahia, alongside Mohamed Melehi, Mohammed Kacimi, Fouad Bellamine, and Abdelkebir Rabi, represented Morocco at the 19th Bienal de São Paulo.