As part of the 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair Marrakech, La Galerie 38 presents Think Out of the Blue, a collective exhibition featuring Ines-Noor Chaqroun, Meriam Benkirane, Yacout Hamdouch, and Nissrine Seffar, on view from 5 to 8 February 2026 at Booth 4, La Mamounia, Marrakech. Conceived specifically for the fair context, the exhibition unfolds as a tightly curated chromatic and conceptual proposition, positioning the colour blue as both material and metaphor within the practices of four contemporary Moroccan women artists.
The exhibition’s title playfully détournes the familiar injunction to “think outside the box,” inviting audiences instead to think from blue, through blue, and within blue. This shift establishes the exhibition as an inquiry into colour as a mental space—an immaterial field capable of opening alternative modes of perception beyond normative frames and dominant narratives. In this sense, Think Out of the Blue proposes blue not merely as a hue, but as a conceptual territorywhere memory, spirituality, intimacy, and resistance intersect.
Blue’s multiple resonances form the curatorial backbone of the project. Across art history and civilisational imaginaries, blue has been associated with the infinite, the sacred, the immaterial, and the melancholic, while also functioning as a cultural code and vessel of memory. The exhibition echoes Yves Klein’s oft-cited assertion that “blue has no dimensions,” situating the works within a chromatic field understood as beyond measure and beyond enclosure—a non-dimension in which sensorial experience and poetic thinking can unfold freely.
Within the compact yet charged spatiality of a fair booth at La Mamounia, the exhibition stages an immersive and polyphonic encounter. Painting emerges as the primary medium, yet each artist approaches the colour blue through distinct material strategies, gestures, and symbolic economies. Together, their works form a constellation of practices that oscillate between abstraction and narration, silence and intensity, heritage and invention, foregrounding the plurality of contemporary Moroccan female artistic voices.
Ines-Noor Chaqroun approaches blue as a script of memory, constructing palimpsestic surfaces where painterly gestures overlap with intimate narratives and historical echoes. Her works function as sites of sedimentation, where shifting identities and temporal layers are inscribed onto chromatic fields, inviting viewers into a reflective engagement with personal and collective memory. Blue becomes, in her practice, both a veil and a revealing surface.
Meriam Benkirane engages blue through a sensorial and meditative register, navigating the space between abstraction and embodiment. Her painterly language unfolds through subtle modulations of saturation and depth, evoking states of contemplation and spiritual suspension. Works such as Convergence Divergence (2025, oil on canvas, 113 × 170 cm) articulate blue as a field of inner resonance, where silence and intensity coexist within slow, deliberate compositional rhythms.
For Yacout Hamdouch, blue vibrates as an emotional frequency, its tonal shifts modulated to evoke the fragility and force of the sensitive. Her practice explores material tension and chromatic vibration, allowing blue to function as a carrier of affect. In works such as 22 (2025, acrylic on wood and painting on glass, 115 × 125 cm), the colour oscillates between opacity and transparency, fullness and void, producing a dynamic interplay between surface and depth.
Nissrine Seffar draws from artisanal gestures, ritual practices, and ancestral pigments to unfold a symbolic blue rooted in material memory. Her work anchors the chromatic inquiry within a tactile and embodied relationship to matter, binding body, territory, and heritage. Through mixed-media approaches, her paintings activate blue as a living substance—at once archaeological and contemporary—where traces of الأرض (soil), memory, and gesture converge.
Collectively, Think Out of the Blue articulates blue as a shared language and a fertile fracture—a surface of contact between different imaginaries that nonetheless preserves each artist’s singular visual grammar. The exhibition proposes painting not as a closed medium, but as an open field of sensorial exchange, capable of holding multiple temporalities and affective registers within a single chromatic horizon.
Presented within the high-visibility platform of 1-54 Marrakech at La Mamounia, the exhibition affirms La Galerie 38’s commitment to foregrounding the contemporary Moroccan female art scene on an international stage. By bringing together practices that are experimental, poetic, and materially engaged, the gallery positions these artists within broader conversations on abstraction, memory, and embodied knowledge in contemporary African art.
Ultimately, Think Out of the Blue invites viewers to relinquish familiar perceptual anchors and to enter a chromatic space of recomposition and openness. To think from blue is, here, to accept disorientation as a productive state—to allow colour to become a mode of thought, a site of resonance, and a portal toward new ways of seeing, feeling, and imagining within the dense, fleeting temporality of the art fair context.
