Hassan Darsi

Le Toit de Monde, 2010/2011
6-channel video, 5’14” – 6’55”

L’Homme qui court, 2009
Video, 5’54”
Performed at the Half Moon Residential Complex construction site, 25 km south of Casablanca.

Hassan Darsi was born in Casablanca in 1961. After 7 years of artistic studies spent at the Higher School of fine arts and visuals of Mons in Belgium, he returned to Morocco in 1989 where he lives and works. Hassan Darsi’s artwork is highly influenced by his life, his everyday life, his environment, by way of processes of work, multiple mediums often taking form thanks to participative projects. In 1995 he founded the project La source du lion in Casablanca. Beginning in 1999, Hassan Darsi has developed a work centered around gilding, his material of predilection being golden paper which he covers with objects—dolls, garden chairs, television, tanks, teeth…- but also public spaces, notably the façade of an art gallery in Casablanca in 2007 and in 2008 concrete blocks of the pier of the Guia de Isora Port in Tenerife. In 2001 he initiated the series “Family Portraits” using the inhabitants of 7 cities across the world from 2001 to 2007 who posed for him in his traveling workshop. The Hermitage Park project developed in the form of artistic footbridges from 2002 to 2008 would mark the beginning of a series of activity and work linked to the questions concerning the city and public space: “Le lion se meurt”, “Le passage de la modernité”, “Le square d’en bas”, “Point zero”… Parallel to these projects he participated in numerous international exhibitions in art centers, museums and biennales: Senegal, South Africa, Lebanon, Spain, France, Germany, the United States, Czechoslovakia, Holland, Belgium and Morocco. His pieces are on view in public and private collections in Morocco and abroad.