12th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art

Myriam El Haïk lives and works in Berlin, DE; Paris, FR; and Rabat, MA

Please Patterns (2021–22) is a piano piece I have composed, its rhythmic and melodic fragments inspired by my drawings and my collection of Moroccan Berber rugs. With its repetitive minimalist aesthetic, it provides the title to an installation-performance featuring a piano, repeated performances, and visual artworks. A series of drawings, several carpets, and a polyptych wall drawing form a counterpoint of patterns and colors to the piano. The instrument’s silence is broken by my piano performances—a regular ritual throughout the 12th Berlin Biennale, offering the experience of an unfolding time, connecting the elements of the installation-performance, and revealing multiple references. The time spent weaving is echoed in the wall drawing; its progressive execution becomes a trace—memory and promise—of music heard and to be listened to. As though the music, with its repeated and multiplied cells, would inhabit the body of each exhibited object. “Inanimate objects, do you have a soul?” (Alphonse de Lamartine) One and the same thread appears to be running from the ancestral tradition of weaving to the act of drawing and eventually to contemporary music: a thread of ritualized time that links writing to speech, the visual to sound, the score to the music. Perhaps a time like that so aptly and genuinely conceived by the Arabic language—without an imperfect or future tense—a time shared between the completed act and the unfinished.

Myriam El Haïk

Exhibitions

Traumatic Lines, 2020, Galerie Vincenz Sala, Berlin (DE)

The figure in the carpet, 2018/19, Galerie Vincenz Sala, Berlin (DE) (solo)

Subversiv, 2017, Haus am Kleistpark, Berlin (DE)

“La Bess ?”, “Comment ça va ?”, 2017, Le Cube, Rabat (MA) (solo)

A B C E, 2016, Galerie Vincenz Sala, Paris (FR) (solo)

Still Working …, 2012, Galerie Vincenz Sala, Paris (FR) (solo)