From 8 April to 30 June 2025, the Mohammed VI Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rabat will have the honour of presenting the exhibition "Tahar Ben Jelloun: From Writing to Painting", a retrospective celebrating the literary and pictorial talents of one of the greatest contemporary intellectuals.

Tahar Ben Jelloun is a writer, poet and painter, winner of the 1987 Prix Goncourt for his novel The Sacred Night. This exhibition will highlight forty works created by the artist in recent years, alongside a valuable selection of manuscripts from around ten of his most notable novels.

"I started drawing before I learned to read and write. My move into painting came about in circumstances where an Italian friend encouraged me and gave me the chance to express myself on large canvases. I immediately took this work seriously, and I moved from what I called 'the pain of the world' that I wrote about in my novels and poetry, to 'the light of that same world' in my attempts to paint and to give the other side of what makes me who I am. This need for light has, from the very start, been what guided me, helped me see the sometimes hidden side of the world. Because, just as in my everyday life, I feel concerned by the violence of the world and also by its hopes — hence this search for the world in a certain kind of joy, with colours that dance and sing, if one takes the trouble to listen." — Tahar Ben Jelloun

Curated by Abdelaziz Elidrissi, deputy director of the Museums of Morocco, this exhibition will offer visitors an immersion in Ben Jelloun's world, where art and literature meet to reveal the luminous facets of the world. Texts by Aziz Daki (co-founder of the L'Atelier 21 gallery in Casablanca), Jérôme Clément (founder of Arte) and Boubker Temli (gallerist in Marrakech and Tangier) will accompany the publication of a catalogue.

To find out more: http://www.museemohammed6.ma/