Wind from the North

Opening at the gallery’s Tribeca location on Friday, November 6, 2026, the exhibition introduces a new body of work spanning sculpture, installation, and works on paper, in which copper, wool, ink, and earth give material form to movement. Rooted in El Gotaibi’s longstanding engagement with the mountains and deserts of Morocco and North Africa, the exhibition considers the instability of geographic and ideological boundaries, and what happens when the landscapes through which we locate ourselves are set in motion.

The exhibition’s title refers not simply to a direction or geography, but to a force that cannot be contained by either. “Wind knows neither North nor South. Neither East nor West,” says El Gotaibi. “It moves freely across territories, indifferent to the categories that divide them.” For the artist, this offers a way to probe the contradictions of geographic classification. His native Morocco occupies the northern edge of Africa, yet belongs to a continent broadly situated within the charged geopolitical construct of the Global South. Wind from the North inhabits this paradox, treating such coordinates not as immutable truths but as inherited systems open to question.

The exhibition expands upon ideas that have been central to El Gotaibi’s practice for more than a decade: territory, the relationship between nature and society, and the opposing forces of polarity and balance that coexist within human civilisation. Here, wind enters this established vocabulary as an agent of change. Familiar silhouettes of mountains and deserts are eroded, displaced, and reconfigured, while the materials themselves bear evidence of environmental and human intervention.

In two large-scale metal works, sections of the material are brushed to a mirror-like finish while others are left to oxidize naturally. Together, the contrasting surfaces create what El Gotaibi describes as “the
impression of a breath.” Mountain and desert forms emerge from the contrast between the two surfaces, their appearance shifting with atmospheric conditions, light, and the presence of the viewer, who is reflected in the work, collapsing the distance between landscape and observer. El Gotaibi similarly uses wool to trace the effects of weather upon the land, cutting and gathering its fibers into abstracted forms. Elsewhere, wool is pressed into ink, leaving irregular impressions determined by pressure and absorption, while soil gathered from New York is compacted into a rammed-earth artwork, embedding the physical material of
the exhibition’s location within the work itself.

These materials carry histories beyond their physical properties. Wool connects El Gotaibi’s work to Morocco’s mountain and desert communities, whose reliance on sheep he has linked to histories of survival,
dignity, and resistance under colonial rule. Metal records exposure through oxidation; earth holds the specificity of place. Bringing organic and industrial matter into tension, El Gotaibi uses material as an active
bearer of social, ecological, and historical meaning. As he has said of his process, “The two must be inseparable: concept and material, idea and matter.”

Questions of passage and connection have long underpinned El Gotaibi’s practice. His ongoing VISIT to Okavango series, initiated in 2011, grew from his fascination with the Okavango River, which crosses southern Africa before dispersing into the Kalahari Desert rather than reaching the sea. Learning of the river prompted the artist to interrogate his own relationship to the continent and the inherited assumption of Europe as its cultural point of reference. Sun(W)hole_piece of cradle (2020), a monumental rammed-earth wall pierced by sunlight, similarly imagined the possibility of breaking through borders that restrict mobility across Africa.

Underlying these works is El Gotaibi’s broader effort to challenge narratives that position Africa as peripheral or lacking, and to assert the continent’s cultural, ecological, and material abundance on its own terms. “Africa has light inside,” says the artist. “We have to trust in it and do something as Africans, not wait for someone else.” Wind from the North extends this proposition beyond fixed coordinates, imagining geography as porous and interconnected, shaped as much by what passes through it as by the lines drawn around it.

Wind from the North runs concurrently with a second solo exhibition - Monomyths by Spanish-Guinean artist, Chidy Wayne.


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