أحمد الكرموني
© Stefano Marchionini
Ahmad Karmouni is a visual artist born in 1994 in Assilah, Morocco. His practice explores the relationship between raw materials and the intangible, seeking to uncover new artistic possibilities rooted in fleeting emotion. He approaches his work as a scientific process, examining the unpredictable nature of matter and its transformations over time. His experimentation spans various media, including installation, drawing, and printmaking techniques.
Karmouni has participated in many residencies and exhibitions, including at the Palais de Tokyo (FR), Fræme (FR), Triangle-Astérides (FR), Fondation FIMINCO (FR), Mahal Art Space (MA), Caravane Tighmert (MA), MAC.A (MA), Jeune Création (FR), Goethe-Institut (MA), Tanger Print Club (MA), LE 18 Marrakech (MA), and GVCC (MA).
In 2020, he co-founded Mouhawalat (Arabic for “Attempts”), an artistic collective dedicated to exploring alternative modes of creation and transmission through a process driven by ongoing experimentation and trial.
French Bio
Ahmad Karmouni est un artiste visuel né en 1994 à Assilah, Maroc. Son travail manifeste une volonté de créer une analogie entre la matière brute et le champ du sensible et de l’immatériel afin de découvrir de nouvelles possibilités plastiques liées à l’émotion éphémère. L’artiste se perçoit dans un processus scientifique où il explore le caractère improbable de la matière et ses différentes réactions et transformations dans le temps. Son champ d’expérimentation touche à plusieurs médiums dont l’installation, le dessin et les techniques d’impression.
Il a participé à diverses résidences et expositions telles que Palais de Tokyo (FR), Fræme (FR), Triangle-Astérides (FR), Fondation FIMINCO (FR), Mahal Art Space, (MA) Caravane Tighmert (MA), MAC.A (MA), Jeune Création (FR), Goethe Institute (MA), Tanger Print Club (MA), LE 18 Marrakech (MA), GVCC (MA).
En 2020, Ahmad a co-fondé «Mouhawalat» (“Tentatives” en Arabe classique), un collectif d’artistes qui vise à imaginer des moyens alternatifs de création et de transmission, à travers un processus basé sur les essais et les tentatives constantes.
Driving along the road between Tangier and Assilah, a dazzling white landscape of salt marshes emerges along the coastline. This play of reflections between earth and sky gives these shimmering salt flats the appearance of dimension-makers. These human-made landscapes are ones I’ve felt connected to since childhood. My fascination with salt has led me to extensive research, tracing its journey through history, religious symbolism, and trade. Every civilization has developed its own relationship with salt, imbuing it with layered meanings. It has been a symbol of alliance, purification, or protection against evil spirits. Salt, though often overlooked today, continues to evolve in how it exists and captivates. A pinch may go unnoticed, but a mountain of it commands awe. Its form is both sturdy and delicate, shaped by its environment and interactions.
During my years at the National Institute of Fine Arts in Tétouan, I began actively exploring this material and its many forms. In the studio, I experimented with different ways of working with salt — a medium that’s as unpredictable as it is expressive. Its dual nature, both fragile and resilient, challenged me to constantly adapt to its ever-shifting properties. This unpredictability awakened my desire to explore salt’s material and immaterial potential alike. I examined its symbolic, historical, and global dimensions, but also looked closer, at its chemical composition and the crystalline structures it forms.
Later, during a residency at the FIMINCO Foundation in Paris, I sought to expand my practice further, but encountered an unexpected challenge: accessing raw salt, specifically halite. Although abundant in Morocco, it proved hard to source in Paris. Unable to collect sea salt, I turned instead to a more intimate source : the human body. More precisely human tears.
I invited volunteers to collect their tears in small vials. Initially, the idea was to extract salt from them. But as the process unfolded, another layer revealed itself, one charged with emotional and symbolic depth. Tears are not just saline; they are also saturated with energy, often tied to the themes I explore in my work: the uncontrollable, the purifying, the liminal. This led me to approach salt not just as a historic or geographic element, but as an emotional material, one capable of archiving fleeting psychological states.
Like emotional archives captured before evaporating, my research began to center on the spiritual and ritualistic dimensions of tears themselves. I became interested in their potential as material traces of moments too subtle or too intense to express in words. I now see tears as a kind of purgation — the release of the unsaid, the unbearable, the internal. This process marks a shift in my practice, from working with raw material to delving into the realm of the intangible and affective, building bridges between the material and the emotional.Currently, I’m focusing on the phenomenon of professional mourners (“cryers”) at funerary rituals, exploring how they embody and give form to grief through their performances. The act of crying, its spontaneity or restraint, led me to this singular figure.
Though now marginal, this ancestral practice still exists in parts of the Maghreb. It has become a symbolic anchor for my work, raising questions around how grief is ritualized, and what inner state is needed to perform it. How much is genuine emotion, and how much is discipline, or even dissociation? What does it mean to embody grief repeatedly? And what can this tell us about our collective relationship to emotion?
These questions underpin my current project Lambout, a word meaning “funnel” in northern Morocco and also evoking the Greco-Roman lacrimarium, a small vessel once used to collect the tears of mourners at funerals. Lambout seeks to make the invisible visible, capturing traces of emotion shaped by memory, culture, and ritual, and reflecting on contemporary ways of transmitting affect. This material curiosity continues to guide my artistic research through various media, including drawing, printmaking, glass, and ceramics.