YO MAMA

Galerie Maïa Muler, Paris (France) · Oct. 22 to Nov. 28, 2015

Musa the fool, Musa the wise.

"But we, we start from the beginning.

We are poor, we no longer know how to play. We have forgotten, the hand has unlearned how to tinker. (Ernst Bloch, p.21)

Ernst Bloch would have been happy to meet Hassan Musa. He, who, in the spirit of utopia, lamented the helplessness into which human society was already sinking. Hassan Musa's hand has not stopped tinkering. Hassan Musa's mind has not forgotten how to play. But to play, one must have that ironic distance that allows one to laugh at everything, but with anyone. One must look at the world with the eyes of a fool or a child, because "life is but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more; it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing..." *Macbeth*, Act V, Scene V. Of course, Macbeth is not mad. And the stories he tells, unlike those of the merchants of truth who pollute our minds, are serious stories. But instead of presenting them as axioms, he turns them into tales. Because the fool is a humble being who seeks to impose nothing on anyone. Musa has not forgotten the greatness of small hands, the modesty of the artisanal labor that any tinkering requires. And through this tinkering, it is our contemporary world that Musa regularly scrutinizes, using very ancient techniques."

- Excerpt of the foreword of the exhibition YO MAMA, Simon Njami  (October 2015)  - Courtesy of the Galerie Maïa Muller

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