The 1-54 Art Fair Has Turned Marrakech into One of Africa’s Most Important Art Hubs

Since its founding in 2018, the Marrakech edition of the 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair has been instrumental in raising the profile of this Moroccan city, long a tourist hub. But the fair, now in its sixth edition, is only one part of an ecosystem that has made Marrakech into one of the Africa’s most important art hubs.

“Marrakech has welcomed, through 1-54, large groups of collectors and institutions, and it’s had a huge impact of the Moroccan ecosystem with galleries opening second locations in Marrakech,” 1-54 founder Touria El Glaoui told ARTnews ahead of the opening of its second VIP day. “The Moroccan art market is very strong. I’ve been saying that loud and clear from even before we started the Marrakech fair. Casablanca, Rabat, Tangiers, and Marrakech [each] have about five or six strong galleries.”  

Though 1-54 started in London and then expanded to New York, El Glaoui’s goal was always to launch a fair on the continent. Because of Marrakech’s attractiveness as a tourist destination and its luxurious hotels and growing food scene, the city became the ideal candidate.

“With Marrakech, it was about finding a city that could sustain the fair,” she said. “The artists all wanted to show on the continent. There’s a pride for them in belonging on the continent. The core of the fair is about promoting and giving visibility to artists from the continent and the African diaspora.”  

The fair, which is spread across two venues, opened on a rainy Thursday morning. From its opening minutes, the intimate hall of the five-star La Mamounia hotel, which is host to 22 of the fair’s 30 booths, was packed, with the aisles crammed with collectors, curators, critics, and more. The smaller portion, consisting of the remaining eight booths, is held at DaDa, a mixed-use space just off Jemaa el-Fnaa, the city’s main bustling square, a 15-minute walk from La Mamounia.

The fair attracts an international audience, with a significant amount visitors hailing from Francophone countries, given Morocco’s prior colonization by France and given that French is widely spoken here.

One of Morocco’s most important commercial enterprises, Loft Art Gallery, which has locations in Casablanca and Marrakech, has participated since the first edition of 1-54 in Marrakech. By 1:30 p.m. on the first day, the gallery had sold almost everything in its booth, including a wall-hung ceramic work by Bouchra Boudoua for 8,000 euros, several paintings by Nassim Azazar for 5,800 euros each, and a textile piece by Amina Agueznay for 15,000 euros.

“Since the first edition, there has been an increase in momentum for Marrakech,” Loft Art Gallery founder Yasmine Berrada told ARTnews. “There’s a lot of interest in the Moroccan art scene—the art world’s eyes are on it.”

Dealer Abla Ababou, who founded an eponymous gallery in Rabat in 2017, is participating in 1-54 Marrakech for the first time, presenting four leading Moroccan artists, all of whom focus on how the use of materials can spur memories of the past and uncover forgotten histories.

“We wanted to venture outside of Rabat to show our artists on a more global scale,” Ababou said. “The Moroccan art scene is still emerging in comparison to the European scenes, but it has also been established for a long time,” especially when taking into account Morocco’s long history of traditional art-making in a country where the divisions between craft and fine art are less pronounced than elsewhere.

Among the most high-profile works on view is a 2021 painting on paper, Blank Stare, by Ghanaian artist Amoako Boafo. Part of a group presentation of Ghanian artists by Accra-based Gallery 1957, the expressive portrait of a young Black man was acquired at the fair by Tate’s Africa Acquisitions Committee Catalyst Fund for the British museum group’s permanent collection. Tate had organized a patron trip to this edition of 1-54 to kickstart the purchasing power of the Catalyst Fund, which launched last year with an aim of supporting contemporary African artists.

“We have almost parallel stories,” El Glaoui said, noting that Tate’s dedicated acquisition program for modern and contemporary African art started in 2012, around a year before 1-54 launched its first London edition. “I think buying something here in Marrakech on the African continent has much more impact than doing it in London. It might encourage other institutions to do the same.”

No one medium or style seems to dominate the fair, though there is a special emphasis on Moroccan artists, both ones based in the country and ones living abroad. Two twinned portraits of a man and a woman by Valérie Ohana at Casablanca’s Myriem Himmich Gallery, for example, were made by mixing the earth with pigment that was then applied to the canvas and to steel wool. The Casablanca-based CDA Gallery has on view computer-generated photographs by Muhcine Ennou that place shiny mirror-glass sculptures in imagined deserts as if they were mirages. A large-scale cracked clay work by Fatiha Zemmouri at Abla Ababou Galerie is particularly striking, as are the ethereal textile works by Malika Sqalli at MCC Gallery’s booth of mountains that the artist, a retired skydiver, sees as self-portraits.

La Galerie 38, which was founded in Casablanca in 2010 and expanded to Marrakech in 2023, has titled its group presentation at the fair “Concrete Bridges” as a way to signal the intergenerational work on view. The booth is highlighted by an untitled abstraction from 2023 by Mohamed Hamidi, one of the leading members of the famed Casablanca Art School of the 1960s and ’70s. (The artist is also the subject of a just-opened, two-person show, with Kendall Geers, at the gallery’s Marrakech location. Geers is also featured in the booth itself.) Elsewhere in the booth are pulsating Op art–inflected pieces by Younes Khourassani, who studied under Hamidi at the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Casablanca in the late ’90s and early 2000s.

A Tate St. Ives survey in 2023, which then traveled to the Sharjah Art Foundation and the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, positioned the Casablanca Art School as one of the most important art movements from Africa, and the international profile of the movement’s artists has been rapidly increasing ever since, with a number of related artists appearing in the 2024 Venice Biennale. Several Casablanca At School artists were represented throughout the fair. Casablanca-based African Arty Art Gallery had on view an untitled 1973 mixed-media work by Abderraham Rahoule, while the Paris-based Nil Gallery is showing two works by Abdellah El Hariri, who is known for blending geometric abstraction with calligraphy.

With this in mind, La Galerie 38 decided to pair these two artists’ work to show the artistic lineage of contemporary art in Morocco, as well as featuring works by even more emerging Moroccan artists, like Yacout Hamdouch, Meriam Benkirane, and Ghizlane Agzenaï, according to the gallery’s Marrakech-based director Canelle Hamon-Gillet. The rising prominence of this iteration of 1-54 on the global fair is part of the reason why La Galerie 38 decide to expand to Marrakech. “This is a very big event in our year,” she said. “Collectors from all over the world come to this very international fair.”

“Morocco is taking on a role of cultural leadership in Africa right now,” Nil Gallery founder Hugo Zeytoun told ARTnews, noting that the country has a strong tradition of collecting. “Marrakech has a special energy. There’s a feeling that you’re part of something exciting happening here [at 1-54]—the birth of an ecosystem.”  

Nil Gallery director Adja Ndiaye added, “Marrakech is becoming one of the most important cities on the continent for contemporary African art.” In addition to the works by El Hariri, the gallery is also showing photographer Sara Benabdallah, who was born and raised in Marrakech, and whose images consider the role of women in Moroccan society, both historically and in the present. The two images on view, from her latest series “Dryland,” show women in traditional dress, each with a white dove, as a way to correlate how both “animals and women are domesticated by society,” Ndiaye said.

The reach of 1-54 is expanding in its exhibitor list as well, with this edition including galleries from two countries that have never before had a presence at the fair: Kuwait and Japan.

The Japanese gallery, Tokyo’s Space Un, set up shop only last April, and 1-54 is the first fair it has ever done. Space Un is also unique in the Japanese art market—it is likely the first and only gallery to focus exclusively on showing contemporary African art in Japan. Space Un’s founder, Edna Dumas, visited 1-54 Marrakech last year just before opening, with an eye toward participating in 2025. “Space Un is an amazing story,” El Glaoui said. “They are doing pioneering job in introducing African art in Japan.”

Now, that dream has become a reality via a joint booth with Senegal’s Galerie Atiss Dakar. Galerie Atiss founder Aissa Dione, who also works as a textile designer and has been traveling to Japan for over 30 years to work with kimono weavers, met Dumas a few years back. The two began collaborating almost immediately via residencies, with Dumas hosting Senegalese artists in Japan and Dione hosting Japanese artists in Senegal.

That residency program has now become formalized under Space Un, as the artists it hosts will now also be able to exhibit at the Tokyo location. “We see ourselves as more of a cultural platform than a commercial gallery,” Space Un director Naoki Nakatani told ARTnews, noting that the art world needs more projects like theirs. In the booth, Space Un is exhibiting one work by the first artist it hosted, Aliou Diack, a Senegalese artist that Galerie Atiss has been representing since 2016. An all-over abstraction, Dialogue 2 (2024), sold within the fair’s first hours.

Dione’s gallery has participated in one edition each of 1-54 in New York and London, but she said the Marrakech fair “is becoming more important than New York and London” for her business, as the fair’s smaller scale allows for more visibility and the ability to make more contacts.

Another first-time exhibitor is Ross-Sutton Gallery, which operates in New York and Stockholm. Gallery founder Destinee Ross-Sutton had participated in 1-54’s New York edition last year, and her husband visited the 2024 iteration in Marrakech and suggested she apply to show here. Although Ross-Sutton was initially hesitant about the success she might have at a fair so far from her two bases, she said that based on the fair’s first hours she was happy she had taken the plunge after all.

“People are here in Marrakech specifically for this fair,” she told ARTnews, noting that 1-54’s London and New York versions are technically satellites to Frieze fairs in those cities. “It reminds me of Art Basel [in Switzerland] in a way. The art is the focus. It adds a level of energy that is lively and chaotic in a good way.”

Two of the artists she showed at 1-54 New York are also here at her Marrakech booth, where Joshua Michael Adokuru’s figurative paintings sold out and a number of Dina Nur Satti’s ceramic vessels also found buyers. During the first hours at the Marrakech fair, she had already made a number of sales for these two artists and the others in her booth.

Also in Ross-Sutton’s booth are mixed-media pieces by Cape Town–based artist Turiya Magadlela, in which the artist has stretched colorful pantyhose—orange, red, pink—over self-portraits. Born in 1978 and coming of age during the final long decade of South Africa’s Apartheid period, the works are a way for the artist to process the “intersection of resistance, survival, and self-discovery” in which she found herself.

“My work wrestles with the tension between the desire to ascend to the rarefied heights of the 1% and the fear of what that might cost—including the alienation of my roots and my own humanity,” Magadlela’s artist statement reads.