Nabili : La Mémoire des Signes

Nabili : La Mémoire des Signes is a posthumous solo exhibition of work by the Moroccan artist Mohamed Nabili. It is at Jamaâ El-Fna, Musée du Patrimoine Immatériel in Marrakech. The show runs from 12 June 2026 to 15 February 2027. Paintings hang on ochre walls, while works on paper are laid out in a vitrine. The image chosen for the exhibition poster is an untitled work in mixed media on wood.

The Fondation Nationale des Musées organises the exhibition in partnership with Marsam Art Gallery, and it opened the museum's summer programme. The organisers name his sources as tifinagh script, tattoo traditions, symbolic motifs and the traces left by shared memory. Le Matin also points to Amazigh signs and to forms taken from popular arts. Nabili worked as a painter, ceramicist and graphic designer as well as a visual artist.

Saharan sand, used in many textures, was his favoured material. Signs, symbols and tifinagh letters are incised into it, and the sand is shaped, hollowed and worked with bright pigment. Carpet designs, tattoo patterns and wall motifs return across the work, alongside calligraphic inscriptions. Nabili spoke of the desert as a philosophy, which he named the philosophy of the essential. Auction listings record works such as Composition bleue, 1987, and Sans titre, 1989.

Born in Benslimane, Nabili trained at the École des arts appliqués in Casablanca in 1973. He moved to France in 1974 and studied at the École d'art et d'architecture de Marseille. Periods in Brittany, Denmark, Peru, Mexico and the United States followed, before he settled back in his home region in the early 1990s. In 2005 he created a foundation for children in Benslimane, Imaginaire de l'enfant dans les arts plastiques. The exhibition also honours this work in art education. Nabili died in Benslimane in 2012.