Casablanca Art School's Human Stories at Tate St Ives

Tate St Ives presents 'The Casablanca Art School', the first UK museum exhibition on the Moroccan modernist movement, traveling to Sharjah Art Foundation next year. The show highlights the school's role in forging a postcolonial Moroccan identity after independence in 1956, under director Farid Belkahia from 1962. Key figures include Mohammed Chabâa and Mohammed Melehi, who taught alongside art historian Toni Maraini and anthropologist Bert Flint. The exhibition emphasizes personal relationships—Melehi and Maraini's marriage, Mustapha Hafid and Anna Draus-Hafid's collaboration, and Carla Accardi's affair with Mohamed Hamidi. Works span paintings, textiles, and street interventions like the 1969 'Présence Plastique' in Marrakech and Casablanca. Critic Charlotte Jansen notes the irony of a decolonizing school now displayed in a Western museum, questioning whether institutions have learned from the past.