Where the Sun Lies (Chapter One)

MCC Gallery opens its new season on 16 October 2026 with the first chapter of Where the Sun Lies, a solo exhibition by the French-Moroccan artist Mounir Ayache at the gallery's Sidi Ghanem space in Marrakech.

The exhibition takes light as the starting point for a journey "between memory, territory and possible futures", in the gallery's words. Drawing on the landscapes, stories and imaginaries of the Maghreb, it sets heritage in dialogue with anticipation, and the past with what is yet to come, in order to shift how we look at the world.

Ayache works through a constellation of sculptures, images, artefacts and digital devices, composing a universe in which different timescales meet and in which our own narratives become living material, able to shape the horizons ahead. The gallery's visual for the show describes it as "an alternative temporality where memory, technology, landscape and imagination intersect".

The project extends a practice that places Ayache at the meeting point of contemporary art, popular culture and entertainment. He uses emerging technologies such as augmented reality, 3D scanning and video games to question inherited Western images of the Arab world and North Africa, often through the lens of Arabfuturism and speculative fiction.

The show arrives in a year of wide recognition for the artist, who was named 2026 laureate of the Recanati-Kaplan Prize with a Villa Albertine residency in the United States this autumn, following exhibitions at the Institut du Monde Arabe, the Jeu de Paume and the Musée d'art contemporain de Lyon. Where the Sun Lies is presented as the first of several chapters.