Marrakech – From December 18, 2025 to January 16, 2026, while Africa’s biggest football dreams unfold with AFCON 2025, the Abla Ababou Gallery in Rabat is staging its own kind of championship.
The name of the match? “Jeux d’Artistes,” a collective exhibition that treats play not as a pastime, but as a serious (and seriously stylish) way of understanding the world.
Bringing together 20 artists with distinct practices, Jeux d’Artistes explores play as a universal language and experimental field.
At the heart of the exhibition, football emerges as a shared cultural emblem. Abdessamad Bouysramne will transform the ball into an almost cosmic figure, charged with collective emotion, while Meriem Aït Tagadirt will capture faces suspended in bubbles of pure enthusiasm.
Ilias Selfati will freeze one of football’s most infamous moments, Zidane’s 2006 headbutt, unpacking the fragile line between glory and violence that defines the modern sports hero.
Elsewhere, play becomes quieter, more fragile. Mohammed Arrhioui will reconstruct eggshells into a silent playing field where tension and delicacy coexist, while Jamil Bennani will encase a ball in plexiglass, allowing chance to distort the illusion of perfection.
Ahmed Aboulanouar, with Freedoom, will turn play into a visual trap, revealing the invisible forces that hold us back, as Hicham Matini will dissect the subtle mechanisms of influence embedded in media imagery.
Memory and childhood also take the field. Margaux Derhy will revisit family archives as a form of intimate play, Sabrine Lahrach will weave memory and textile into tactile narratives, and Guy Calamusa will let the brush rediscover the spontaneity of childhood.
Azzedine Baddou, through photography, will capture the adult gaze confronting the remnants of innocence once taken for granted.
The game expands into movement, form and material. Christophe Miralles will propose a pictorial Kamasutra where colors and textures intertwine freely, Flo Arnold will suspend gestures into luminous arabesques, and Itaf Benjelloun will assemble iron, earth, and wood into poetic figures caught mid-play.
Christian Goetghebeur will free color from representation, Walid Bendra will experiment with analog processes to create new visual realities, and Andy Baille will compose scenes where shadow and color gently negotiate their way toward light.
Objects, too, join the game.
Nafie Benkrich will elevate everyday items with feathers and gold, Mounat Charrat will transform a puzzle piece into a mirror, and Hamouda Mouzouna will reflect on existence itself as a playing field suspended between light and darkness.
