Achraf Touloub

Other residents

To mark the Cities Week of the Dubai World Expo, Art Explora is exhibiting the works of eight internationally renowned French artists. Exploring the role of ecosystems in urban environments, these works are being presented simultaneously in several urban spaces, both in Dubai and Paris, in order to share the World Expo's artistic program with the widest possible audience.

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Achraf Touloub

Landscape Stream, 2021, Ink on paper, 50 x 70 cm

Courtesy of the artist

Artwork presented in the Palais Royal - Musée du Louvre metro station and in front of the French Pavilion at the Dubai World Expo. 

The work on paper Landscape Stream (2021), a landscape of trees intertwined to form rings, is central to Achraf Touloub's artistic reflection. His work explores the complex and intimate links between the development of communication technologies and the symbolic power of tradition. In these circular trees, where roots mingle with branch extensions, there is a desire to grasp nature at a time when an entire facet of reality unfolds in cables and interfaces. In his artistic approach, the artist also sought to "draw time," endlessly repeating lines like commas punctuating the paper and adopting a symbolic line and texture inspired by Persian miniature painting in its structure and breath. This composition of a flowing landscape is an allegory, that of a world where the foundations of modernity are found levitating, announcing, in a cyclical relationship to history, the return of metaphysics. Ironically, this resurgence is a result of the development of dematerialized technological tools.

Achraf Touloub

Lataïf , 2016-2020, Watercolor on paper, 35 x 52 cm

Courtesy of the artist and Galeria Plan B

Artwork displayed on Jumeirah Road in Dubai. 

The work Lataïf is part of a series of watercolor studies conducted between 2016 and 2019. Between sensuality and abstraction, the artist seeks to pictorially suggest the simultaneous dimensions [physical, virtual, and mental] in which our bodies unfold today. According to the artist, these "dimensions" are constantly evolving: the body, in "its conditions, its contours, and its meaning," is caught in a continuous process of redefinition, evolving with each new industrial or technological advancement. Its composition, reminiscent of Cubo-Futurism with its intersecting silhouettes and repeated figures that fracture the surface, blends bodies and psyches. These superimposed planes of reality invite us to experience the effects of a present that stretches out like an endless instant. And, by extension of this principle, it is indeed the stakes of our own perception in a hyper-connected world that are at issue.

The artist's biography

Achraf Touloub was born in Casablanca, Morocco, in 1986. He lives and works in Paris. His work explores the links between the notion of tradition and new communication technologies in a globalized world. He focuses on the initiatory and immersive dimensions inherent in technological tools, which, paradoxically, echo the representational strategies of a primordial era. His pictorial work has led him to explore diverse forms of representation, from Persian miniatures to Futurist aesthetics, where the transformations of a world in the face of digital technology and the redefinition of our bodies are depicted. A graduate of the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, his work has been exhibited in numerous institutions worldwide, notably at the 2017 Venice Biennale. In 2021, his project “ A Window for a World ” was selected for the programme residency organized jointly by Art Explora and the Cité internationale des arts. The artist is represented by the Baronian Xippas gallery (Brussels) and PLAN B gallery (Berlin). 

Discover the works of the seven other artists featured in the “ Other Inhabitants ” exhibition:

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This project is supported by the French Institute in the United Arab Emirates, JCDecaux, the French Pavilion at the Dubai World Expo and the RATP.

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