Crazy Lines

Crazy Lines is an in-situ work by the Moroccan artist Yassine Balbzioui at MACAAL, the Museum of African Contemporary Art Al Maaden in Marrakech, on view since 8 February 2026. It is not a separate temporary exhibition but a commission placed inside the museum's collection display, Seven Contours, One Collection. Balbzioui made it for the staircase that links the ground and first floors. The work combines a wall painting, oil paintings on canvas and sculptural frames.

Balbzioui made the piece on site between December 2025 and January 2026, after preparatory work during a production residency at the museum. The paint does not stay inside the frames. It runs out across the walls of the stairwell, so the canvases and the mural read as one crowded set. Visitors moving up or down the stairs pass through this set and stand roughly where an audience would sit before a stage.

Masked figures fill the walls in scenes that are grotesque, playful and hard to pin down. The mask has run through Balbzioui's work for years. In this installation the museum treats it as a fixed visual element rather than a symbol to decode. The figures behind it seem acted, hidden and at times caricatured, each one held inside a role. Humour and tension keep the whole scene closed in on itself.

MACAAL sets aside three spaces on its permanent route for temporary installations tied to the museum's themes. Crazy Lines took the staircase in February 2026, alongside Statues Also Breathe in the Atrium and Fatiha Zemmouri's Ilā Turāb in the Artist Room. Balbzioui was born in Morocco in 1972. He studied at the fine arts school in Casablanca and later in Bordeaux and California. He works in painting, drawing, performance and installation.