OFF Record presents What Faces Do Not Say, a group exhibition on view from January 22 to February 22, 2026, in Marrakech, bringing together nine artists whose practices critically examine the human figure beyond facial legibility. Curated by Yasmin Sarnefors, the exhibition brings Ibrahim Meïté Sikely, Lassana Sarre, Nadjib Ben Ali, Beau Disundi Nzazi, Chama Bekri, Yasmine Laraqui, Mohamed Saïd Chair, El Hadi Fekrouni, and Nyaba Léon Ouedraogo into a shared inquiry around presence, memory, invisibility, and transformation. The project unfolds as a sustained reflection on how the human subject resists containment in a contemporary world dominated by images.
In an era defined by the massive circulation of visual content, the face has become an overdetermined surface expected to reveal identity, origin, and belonging. Faces are constantly scrutinized, categorized, and reproduced, often under social, political, or technological regimes of control. Rather than deepening our understanding of humanity, this saturation has flattened it, reducing presence to something immediately readable and assignable. What Faces Do Not Say begins from this tension, asking whether it is possible to exist outside predefined identities imposed by the gaze of others.
The exhibition deliberately shifts attention away from facial transparency toward moments where the human figure escapes conventional frameworks of representation. Bodies, gestures, materials, and traces take precedence over recognizable features, allowing presence to emerge through ambiguity and instability. Across the exhibition, portraiture is displaced in favor of transformation and becoming, where the figure is understood as fluid rather than fixed. Identity is treated not as a stable category, but as a constellation of overlapping states shaped by time, memory, and context.
Structured in two phases, the exhibition develops its curatorial argument gradually. The first phase, running from January 22 to February 1, brings together eight painters whose practices explore presence through intimacy, materiality, and fragmentation. Each artist approaches the figure from a distinct perspective, yet collectively they resist the authority of the face as a singular site of meaning. Painting becomes a space for uncertainty, tension, and reflection rather than resolution.
Chama Bekri’s small-scale works anchor the exhibition in introspection and care. Her paintings focus on subtle bodily details, evoking a meditative and almost therapeutic approach to representation. Rather than depicting complete figures, she allows fragments and sensations to speak, emphasizing vulnerability and interiority. Presence in her work unfolds quietly, through attention and restraint.
El Hadi Fekrouni’s paintings introduce figures marked by solitude and calm, where isolation is reframed as a form of affirmation. His compositions are serene and deliberate, allowing the figure to exist without narrative pressure or spectacle. In works such as Telepathy (2023), presence is conveyed through stillness and introspection, suggesting that identity does not require visibility to be valid.
Yasmine Laraqui’s practice draws from personal and family archives, translating memory into painterly form. Her works, including Garden Party (2024), operate through absence, trace, and the passage of time, allowing inherited histories to surface indirectly. Rather than reconstructing the past, Laraqui lets it remain partial and unresolved, emphasizing how identity is often shaped by what is remembered and what is lost.
Material takes on a central role in Beau Disundi Nzazi’s contribution, where the human figure is replaced by its support. Working with makayabu cardboard—commonly associated with the transport of salted fish—Nzazi foregrounds histories of circulation, labor, and exchange embedded within the material itself. In Dad’s Tears (2025), absence becomes a powerful presence, pointing to personal narratives and collective memory through the weight of the object.
The figure re-enters the exhibition through Lassana Sarre’s paintings, which depict fragile and unstable bodies caught in states of transition. His work repositions Black presence in contemporary painting as a site of questioning and transmission rather than assertion. Bodies appear vulnerable and unresolved, opening space for storytelling and reflection. Sarre’s figures resist completion, emphasizing becoming over arrival.
Ibrahim Meïté Sikely’s luminous and densely layered portraits introduce a sense of intensity and multiplicity. Drawing from classical painting, popular culture, and fantastical imagery, his works convey overlapping histories and emotional turbulence. In Brahim Asloum and the others standing and facing infinity! (2021), figures seem suspended between worlds, suggesting that identity is shaped by both imagination and lived experience.
Mohamed Saïd Chair approaches painting as a performative stage where gesture and posture become central to meaning. His large-scale work Fight in the Bank (2021) transforms a familiar environment into a charged theatrical scene. Through exaggerated movement and spatial tension, Chair interrogates how identity is read through bodily expression and social performance.
The first phase culminates with Nadjib Ben Ali’s fragmented reinterpretations of football broadcast imagery. By isolating and distorting screenshots of matches, he breaks faces and bodies into spectral forms. In works such as OSBORN EFFECT III (AUTOTUNE) (2024), the spectacle of sport becomes an intense and almost violent visual field, exposing how mass media disassembles presence through repetition and excess.
The second phase of the exhibition begins on February 2 with the introduction of photographic works by Nyaba Léon Ouedraogo, extending the exhibition’s reflection into the realm of photography. His images enter into dialogue with the painters, reinforcing the exhibition’s focus on invisibility, memory, and transformation. The shift in medium deepens the exploration of how presence is constructed and concealed.
Central to Ouedraogo’s practice is the use of masks, which deliberately obscure the face rather than reveal it. By covering facial features, the artist emphasizes that identity is not located in visibility but in gesture, context, and atmosphere. In works such as Théâtre populaire 8 (2019), the mask becomes a reminder that the self is formed in shadowed zones, silences, and temporal traces.
Presented within La Taverne, one of the oldest restaurants in Guéliz, Marrakech, the exhibition occupies a section of the venue that had long remained closed. Located at 23 Boulevard Mohamed Zerktouni, the space offers an intimate and unconventional setting, removed from traditional exhibition circuits. This proximity encourages a direct and sensitive relationship with the works, allowing viewers to encounter the exhibition at a human scale.
Produced by OFF Record, a curatorial and art advisory laboratory founded by Yasmin Sarnefors, the exhibition reflects a practice deeply attentive to place and history. OFF Record engages atypical spaces, transforming them into sites of encounter and experimentation where art is experienced in close relation to its environment. Sarnefors, an independent curator shaped by African art scenes and professional experiences across Morocco, France, and Brazil, brings a curatorial approach informed by her work with the Dakar Biennale, Art Basel, 1-54 Marrakech, MENART Paris, and the Comptoir des Mines gallery. Through What Faces Do Not Say, OFF Record invites audiences to reconsider human presence as fluid, unruly, and constantly in transformation, revealing what remains when the face no longer speaks.
