A giant web has landed amid the ruins of Marrakech’s largest mosque. The gossamer installation, by Berlin-based Barkow Leibinger Architects, is part of the fourth Marrakech Biennale, during which the city plays host to a rich mix of literature, film, music and art events.
Titled ‘Loom-Hyperbolic’, the site-specific work in the grounds of Mosque Koutoubia, is inspired by the Moroccan weaving craft and the geometry of Marrakech architecture. The structure – fashioned out of local hand-peeled pinewood – echoes the form of the traditional wooden loom, and creates a canopied ‘hyperbolic’ effect once the yarn has been stretched over its frames. Its grid arrangement reflects the positioning of the nearby broken-off columns.
Loom-Hyperbolic is part of the main visual arts exhibition of the Biennale, titled 'Higher Atlas', and bringing together the likes of former Turner Prize nominee Roger Hiorns and architect Juergen Mayer H. Both familiar and foreign within its medieval setting, the ethereal installation can be viewed by day or night from above the ruin, or from beneath the structure, in tent-like seclusion.
Titled ‘Loom-Hyperbolic’, the site-specific work in the grounds of Mosque Koutoubia, is inspired by the Moroccan weaving craft and the geometry of Marrakech architecture
The structure is fashioned out of local hand-peeled pinewood and echoes the form of the traditional wooden loom
Both familiar and foreign within its medieval setting, the ethereal installation can be viewed by day or night from above the ruin, or from beneath the structure, in tent-like seclusion
A sketch by Barkow Leibinger Architects shows the structure's grid arrangement, which reflects the positioning of the nearby broken-off columns
The angled wooden poles create a canopied ‘hyperbolic’ effect once the yarn has been stretched over its frames
ADDRESS
Mosque Koutoubia
Marrakech
Morocco
VIEW GOOGLE MAPS
-
Like a modernist iceberg, this Krakow house has a perfectly chiselled façadeA Krakow house by Polish architecture studio UCEES unites brutalist materialities with modernist form
-
Leo Costelloe turns the kitchen into a site of fantasy and uneaseFor Frieze week, Costelloe transforms everyday domesticity into something intimate, surreal and faintly haunted at The Shop at Sadie Coles
-
Can surrealism be erotic? Yes if women can reclaim their power, says a London exhibition‘Unveiled Desires: Fetish & The Erotic in Surrealism, 1924–Today’ at London’s Richard Saltoun gallery examines the role of desire in the avant-garde movement
