Prélude et Fugue

Galerie Bab Rouah in Rabat presents Prélude et Fugue, a solo exhibition by the Moroccan artist Itaf Benjelloun, from 2 to 19 October 2026. Curated by Hasnae Lachgar, the show brings together sculptures, photographs and installations. Benjelloun works with iron, earth, wood and glass, and with photography. The Senegalese artist Anta Germaine Gaye joins the exhibition with a guest intervention.

Benjelloun has said that her true material is time rather than metal, glass or light. Every object in the show had an earlier life and still carries marks of it: a chair leg, a harrow, a spiral. By the entrance, an installation pairs sculptures with photographs. In the main hall, sculptures whose eyelids are shut project fragments of faces onto the wall from their eyes when lit.

The title comes from music: in a fugue, a motif heard in one voice is repeated by the voices that follow, each altering it. In French, fugue can also mean an escape. Benjelloun told the MAP news agency that she had a piece by Bach in mind. She described the show as treating the photograph as a personal archive that is meant to become a collective one. Her training in literature brings narrative to the work, she said, while architecture lets her treat space as part of the visual story.

Benjelloun trained in architecture in Toulouse and in French literature in Rabat, and practises as an interior architect alongside her art. She was born in Ksar el Kébir, is based in Tangier and has exhibited since 1997. In 2025 she held the solo exhibition Andante at the Artorium of Fondation TGCC in Casablanca. Gaye, a painter and sculptor known for reverse glass painting, has run Atelier Fer & Verre in Dakar since 1999. The two artists have been in dialogue since 2013. The organisers present the Rabat show as the first movement of a conversation that continues in Dakar. There, a joint project is planned at Fer & Verre during the sixteenth Dak'Art in November 2026.