Les Sentiers de l'Intranquillité

Comptoir des Mines Galerie in Marrakech presents Les Sentiers de l'Intranquillité, a solo exhibition by Hassan Bourkia, from 23 October to 15 November 2026. Bourkia is a Moroccan writer, translator and artist born in El Ksiba in 1956. The show is built around wall-mounted shelving units, one of them triangular, painted a uniform dusty grey. Their compartments hold rows of books, rotary telephones, a radio, a film projector, a teacup and a pair of spectacles, all coated in the same grey.

Literature is the thread. Bourkia has translated Nietzsche, Paul Ricoeur and Edmond Amran El Maleh into Arabic, and books have long fed his visual work. The gallery points to writers whose lives were shaped by exile, censorship, violence or solitude. Names and phrases are handwritten across the back panels of the shelves: Camões, Goethe's Faust, and a line in Arabic script.

The library is the exhibition's main form. Bourkia treats it at once as a frame, a material and a subject, at a time when the role of the library is changing. Typewriters, cameras and other old devices sit beside the books, so that the tools of writing and recording share the shelf with what they produced. Ash carries a double meaning here. It recalls books and libraries that were burned, yet it is also the residue left behind, a mark from which something can be recovered.

This is his second solo show with the gallery after Au nom des miens, which reopened the space on 12 December 2020 with burnt letterboxes, rusted metal and dust. In 2019 he built Exodus Library, a book installation made for the Immigrants' Hotel in Buenos Aires during Bienalsur. That work also took the form of a library, assembled from books, papers and objects.