Marwan Rechmaoui
Abo Baker

Throughout his career, Marwan Rechmaoui has maintained a drawing practice. During the Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns the artist spent his evenings recording thoughts and imagery on paper, inspired by events happening around him, music, his garden, and the news. These drawings are contemporaneous in their concerns and are indexical of a destitute time and space in the aesthetics they conjure. They invite audiences to embrace disidentification as a legible mode of relating to and dealing with the social relations and material conditions they navigate and operate within.
Abo Baker, on the other hand, is an homage to Yemeni singer, artist, and composer Abu Bakr Salem Balfaqih, whose patriotic odes to Yemen celebrate significant historical events, such as the abolition of the monarchy in the north in 1962; the independence of the south in 1967; and the unification of both the South and North Yemen in 1990. The drawing is meant to depict a derelict oud, Abu Baker’s privileged instrument, getting assailed by the onslaughts against civilian life in Yemen, at the hands of the Saudi-led coalition and Houthi rebels.