From Casablanca to Geneva: La Galerie 38 Opens a New Chapter

In the atmospheric heart of Geneva’s Quartier des Bains—a neighborhood synonymous with avant-garde art and cultural experimentation—the arrival of La Galerie 38 marks more than just the inauguration of a new space. It signals a tectonic shift in the global art conversation, one that moves decisively beyond geographical binaries to embrace a fluid, polyphonic vision of contemporary expression.

Founded in 2010 in Casablanca by Fihr Kettani and Mohammed Chaoui El Faiz, La Galerie 38 has quietly evolved into a formidable force on the African and international contemporary art scenes. With spaces already established in Casablanca and Marrakech, the gallery’s new outpost in Geneva, curated under the discerning eye of art advisor Julie Fazio, is a bold declaration: the global south is not simply emerging—it is leading.

The opening exhibition, Anima Mundi, presents a curatorial manifesto of sorts. Its title, which translates as “soul of the world,” is no mere metaphor. Rather, it encapsulates a spiritual and aesthetic ambition—to map the shifting tensions and transformations of our era through the eyes of four artists who resist categorization: Younes Khourassani, Soly Cissé, Abdoulaye Konaté, and Barthélémy Toguo.

A Cartography of Tensions and Transcendence

Anima Mundi is not content to offer passive beauty or detached conceptualism. Instead, it plunges us into a sensory and emotional confrontation with our times. The exhibition reads like a conversation across borders—temporal, political, geographic—where the artists act as both witnesses and alchemists.

Younes Khourassani, the Moroccan visual poet of light and space, presents works that float between ephemerality and form. His exploration of chromatic flux, layering, and shadow evokes both quietude and tension—reminders that movement and stasis coexist in every moment of transformation.

From Dakar, Soly Cissé delivers a cacophony of color and silhouette, merging figuration and abstraction to create fantastical beings that inhabit both myth and metropolis. His hybrid creatures—part-human, part-animal, entirely other—speak to fractured identities and the ever-mutating nature of the self in a postcolonial, post-digital world.

Textile titan Abdoulaye Konaté, whose monumental fabric compositions have graced the walls of the Centre Pompidou and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, harnesses color not as ornament, but as political code. His works, constructed from vibrantly dyed strips of fabric, blend aesthetic rigor with social urgency—meditations on ecology, migration, and the cultural fault lines of West Africa.

Finally, Barthélémy Toguo—Cameroonian master of media and message—infuses his installations with the energy of ritual, protest, and movement. From watercolor to performance, his work interrogates systems of power and migration, inscribing the human body into the landscape of memory and resistance.

A Bridge, Not a Boundary

What distinguishes La Galerie 38’s Geneva opening is not merely the caliber of its artists, but the ethos that underpins its expansion. Julie Fazio’s vision—rooted in geometric abstraction and a deep commitment to cross-cultural discourse—melds seamlessly with the gallery’s foundational belief that art transcends boundaries. Geneva, long a diplomatic and humanitarian capital, becomes here a crucible for a new kind of art diplomacy, one predicated not on consensus, but on courageous juxtaposition.

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This is no Eurocentric detour; it is a reclamation of space, a deliberate interpolation of African voices into the beating heart of European contemporary culture. The gallery’s tri-continental presence—Casablanca, Marrakech, Geneva—is less a network than a constellation: luminous, connected, in constant orbit.

Toward a Living Present

Anima Mundi offers no easy resolutions. Its power lies in its refusal to stabilize, in its embrace of motion, mutation, and multiplicity. In a world unmoored from fixed identities and failing certainties, these four artists give form to the ineffable, to the liminal pulse of our shared moment.

As visitors step into the 24 rue des Bains space, they are not simply entering a gallery—they are stepping into a living, breathing present, refracted through the visions of those who know how to see differently.

La Galerie 38 has arrived in Geneva. And with it, the soul of the world.