Resisting from Morocco's Margins

After completing his studies in Spain’s La Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando (San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts), the artist Ahmed Amrani (b. 1942) returned to a newly independent Morocco, where he spent a demanding period creating murals and posters for the Rif Revolts of 1958. After Morocco’s independence in 1956, local citizens of the Rif, a region in the northeast of Morocco, resisted the central government’s policies, leading to a brutal clash between civilians and the royal army. Although invigorated and hopeful following independence, Amrani was negatively affected by the uprisings, which led to the newly autonomous Moroccan government to brutally punish those involved. Amrani used his artistic practice to express his anxiety over the oppressive national politics of the time. None of the murals or posters exist and no photo documentation remains of these ephemeral political gestures. Resisting from the Margins: Ahmed Amrani’s Protesta (1969) explores the only artwork from this period that remains: a politically charged oil-on-paper painting from 1969 titled Protesta that depicts an impassioned mass of protestors chanting and raising their fists in the air.
Amrani’s artistic production during this time, including the painting Protesta, has a ‘strong goyesque expressivity’, referring to the late-18th- and early 19th-century Spanish painter and printmaker Francisco Goya (1746–1828). In 1961, Amrani moved to Madrid to continue his formal fine arts training at La Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando (San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts), where he would remain until completing his degree in 1965. According to Amrani and art historian Clara Miret Nicolazzi, he frequented numerous galleries and museums in Spain such as the Museo Nacional del Prado and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. He discovered new tendencies and trends in fine arts and was particularly attracted to Goya, who would become a major influence on his practice throughout the 1960s. Amrani was struck by Goya’s stylistic liberty and ability to illustrate his relationship with the historical moment in which he lived. With Protesta, Amrani accomplished the same: he solidified himself as one of the most politically active artists from Tetouan’s art school during the modern period of the 1950s and 1960s and formally diverged from his peers with his use of expressive brushstrokes and a combination of figurative and abstracted imagery.
Composed of an introductory chapter, three body chapters and a concluding chapter, Resisting from the Margins is a project that comprehensively explores the socio-political context in which Protesta was made, specifically, the Rif Revolts of the late 1950s. In addition to exploring this political moment, this title will demonstrate how social, political and cultural marginalisation affected the arts community and the artistic pedagogy of Tetouan’s art school, today known as L’Institut National des Beaux Arts (The National Institute of Fine Arts, INBA). Amrani’s Protesta provides an avenue for exploring this understudied moment in Morocco’s post-independence history. This project will also discuss the present-day reception of the artwork, which was exhibited for the first time in 2021 at the Reina Sofía as part of the exhibition Moroccan Trilogy: 1950–2020. The title’s author was the curatorial assistant for the exhibition and selected the artwork on behalf of the show’s curators. Out of over seventy artworks, Protesta was one of only a handful of artworks exhibited by a Tetouani artist. Visitors found the work incredibly impactful and relevant to the contemporary Hirak Rif Movement (2016–), a recent uprising in the Rif that traces its roots to the original Rif Revolts. The painting, once an avenue for Amrani to express his frustration with the Moroccan state, today serves as a poignant reminder of the resilience of and resistance by the Rif’s civilians against oppression.