OFLUXO

As an artist, designer, scenographer, writer, poet and actor, Than Hussein Clark creates work that brings theatricality into various contexts. A graduate of the University of Edinburgh, Goldsmiths College in London and the University of Fine Arts of Hamburg, Than Hussein Clark has to his credit around twenty theatrical plays and just as many exhibitions. He endeavours to explore that which eludes the dominant culture, whether through architecture, the decorative arts, or theatre. He decompartmentalises genres, canons and know-how while enlisting a variety of techniques: rug weaving, wood sculpting, resin, metal. A screen becomes a landscape, a window a painting, a coat a sculpture. By intensifying styles to the point of rendering them “decadent”, he reminds us that glamour is a deformation of the grammar of forms. Equally active both in the theatrical field and on exhibition sites, Than Hussein Clark shifts boundaries and transforms the uses of objects and places.

For him, every new project is a chance to develop research on art figures who have remained on the margins of grand history. For the exhibition at the CRAC, he takes inspiration from Tangier and from the cosmopolitan art scene that injected life into that city throughout the 20th century (William S. Burroughs, Jean Genet, Paul Bowles, Yves Saint Laurent, or the fabulously wealthy heiress Barbara Hutton…).

The artist has produced a series of sculptures and sound works, as well as a film shot in Tangier in 2020, a generic work conceived according to the principle of a collective journey, on which he invited friends and partners, such as the American poet James Loop.

In the exhibition, various decorative elements evoke notions of the stage, the threshold and the boundary. Scents, windows, clocks, furniture and reconstructed interiors constantly recall Tangier. A city of arrival and departure, Tangier faces the Mediterranean just like Sète, allowing a reversal
of perspective on Europe, seen from Africa.