Ahlam L

June 4, 2007

Artist Ambassador to Morocco Ahlam Lemseffer takes part in the Grand National Exposition of Plastic Arts.

The exhibition opened on Thursday may 31, 2007 and is the third edition of a series of programs organized by the AVAA association. This year's theme is "The return to figuration" and the group of artists is examining a developing phenomenon occurring throughout the world highlighted by a return to figuration. The group is trying to understand the cultural ramifications of what is causing its return and why.

Following is an image of the invitation and a group collage of the AVAA group.

Ambassador Ahlam brings into the project a history of dedication to the idea of peace that she has been nurturing for a number of years and shared at conference venues in Sarajevo, Beirut, Rhodes, Cairo and Morocco.

Ms. Ahlam was born in El Jadida, Morocco. She studied fine arts in Paris and holds a masters degree in English literature. Her catalog of personal and group exhibitions is quite impressive, her art is deeply embedded in nature, her palette is vibrant, perhaps to further enrich the connections she makes between nature's grand spectacle and our ability to perceive it, not so much with awe but with respect.

She has shared with us a number of works from a series titled "Memories"

Ahlam has for several years explored issues of mutual acceptance and their relevance to peace as social mechanisms that are surfacing along with the emergent global civilization.

These concerns are brought up to the surface in a center piece installation for this exhibit where Ahlam takes the variations of skin color to the extremes of our perception of black and white and thereby include conceptually every variation in between to reveal a visual experience of the boundaries of acceptance in all of its possibilities.

The figures in the installation commingle even if, at least seemingly, their acceptance of each other is as passive as it is now in the real world and the temerity of their tenuous relationship is largely influenced by the social forces that are at the hands of the "decision Makers" as stated by Ahlam.

The installation seems to be permeated by a highly personalized feeling of mutual acceptance that is not declared openly. The background, a veil of pure white material that echoes the purity and innocence of the untouched future and the fresh reality of the broken harmony in the recent past.

Ahlam reveals a quickening to our resolve for mutual acceptance as a key to the realization of peace, a state of civilization that is reached not by the collision of the extremes as guided by the myths we have created about color, but rather, by the informed reality that black and white are not colors at all. Humanity is a compendium of the gradations that exist in between extremes and whose combined presence is the glory, the history and the future of the human species.

The rest of the exhibit expanded on the theme of acceptance, as she explores the mutuality of the tones and their essential tensions. Ahlam's hand seems to be tempered by the emotional volatility of the subject matter as moments in time, a temporal transition which she defies in order to slow their movement to allow us to participate in the process and experience a visual variation of acceptance.