Hajar Lmortaji Brings Pessoa’s Imaginary World to Rabat

The Moroccan artist’s new exhibition explores the meeting point between Moroccan expression, Portuguese memory, and abstract visual language.

Fez — Moroccan artist Hajar Lmortaji is presenting her new exhibition “Dans l’Imaginaire de Pessoa” at Galerie Nationale Bab El-Kebir in Rabat, bringing together Moroccan artistic expression and Portuguese cultural references in one of the capital’s historic exhibition spaces.

The show, scheduled from May 14-22 carries the subtitle “A Moroccan Expression with Portuguese Accents,” pointing to the artist’s continued interest in the links between Morocco and Portugal.

The exhibition’s title evokes Fernando Pessoa, the Portuguese modernist poet whose work remains one of the most influential bodies of literature in Portugal.

Pessoa is widely recognized for his fragmented literary universe, built through multiple invented authorial identities and inner voices. His writing has often been read as a meditation on selfhood, imagination, and the many lives a person can contain.

For Lmortaji, that symbolic world offers fertile ground for visual interpretation. Rather than presenting Pessoa as a purely literary figure, the exhibition appears to use his imaginary universe as a starting point for color, texture, emotion, and abstraction.

A Moroccan voice with Portuguese echoes

The exhibition continues a direction already visible in Lmortaji’s recent work. In 2025, she presented “Crossed Horizons” at the National Gallery Bab Rouah in Rabat, a show that brought together abstract works inspired by Rabat and Lisbon.

That earlier exhibition positioned her art between two cities and two emotional geographies. “Dans l’Imaginaire de Pessoa” seems to deepen that dialogue, shifting from the urban memory of Lisbon toward the poetic and psychological world of one of Portugal’s most emblematic writers.

Lmortaji’s practice has often moved between abstraction and expression, using the canvas as a space for feeling rather than direct narration. A 2023 Morocco World News (MWN) profile described her as a self-taught Moroccan artist working across abstract and figurative expressionism, highlighting her participation in Rabat’s “Autodid’Art” exhibition.