Younès Rahmoun: Here, Now, currently on view at the Smith College Museum of Art (SCMA), is the Moroccan artist’s first retrospective exhibition held in North America. True to Rahmoun’s multidisciplinary and expansive practice, Here, Now is comprised of four different installations on Smith College’s campus.

Younès Rahmoun: Here, Now begins on the first-floor gallery of Smith College Museum of Art (SCMA), where visitors are introduced to Rahmoun’s artistic career and biography. One of the first sections in the gallery presents archival materials, such as sketches and notes in both Arabic and French, documenting Rahmoun’s artistic practice. This display keys viewers into recurrent themes found throughout the surrounding gallery, including an interest in foundational forms, such as atomic structures, cycles of natural growth, and the environment. Nearby, two table cases feature preparatory sketches for Rahmoun’s video work Habba (Seed), and the installation Ghorfa (Al-Ana/Huna) (Small Room [Now/Here]), which are both on display at different sites beyond the museum walls. This insight into the artist’s process nevertheless also sheds light on work present in the gallery, including the large-scale sculpture Darra-Kown (Atom-Universe) from 2012, whose shape, in miniature form, can be found in one of the cases dedicated to the artist’s research materials, alongside other miniature models and materials, including glass, pencil shavings, and yarn, recreating the space of the artist’s studio.

Other works in this gallery include one of Rahmoun’s earliest installations, Kemmoussa (Small Bundle), completed in 2001. Here, the kemmoussas, or small plastic bags, are displayed in three rows along the gallery walls. The bags bulge slightly under tightly knotted handles; while they could easily be mistaken as containers for solid goods, they are in fact inflated by the artist’s breath. According to Rahmoun, the act of creating the bundles by breathing into them constitutes a meditative act. This emphasis on meditation, interior reflection, and spiritual life presages an important, if not explicitly identified theme within the exhibition’s focus. Indeed, religion appears to subtly undergird many of the works in the retrospective, among them Kemmoussa: the installation features ninety-nine kemmoussas, a recurring number in the exhibition which is significant due to its importance to the Islamic faith, while meditation and prayer constitute important facets of the artist’s practice.

The exhibition continues on the museum’s ground floor, where large-scale installations are displayed, such as Markaba (Vessel), a five-sided geometric dome mounted on stilts, all made of brass. The dual date of Markaba (2016/2024) suggests that it was either made on site or shortly prior to the exhibition opening, not unlike the nearby work, Nakhla-Khazaf (Palm Tree-Ceramic), which was originally created in 2006 and then reproduced almost locally at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design ahead of the show.

In addition to creating works nearly in situ, the museum display features direct responses to the geography of the exhibition site, such as with Jabal-Hajar-Turab (Mountain-Stone-Earth), a 2024 installation of drawings and photographs hung on walls painted from color produced with a soil sample collection near Smith’s athletic fields. This awareness of the local environment extends to the satellite installations spread throughout the campus, all enmeshed within the natural elements: a screening of the video work Habba in the Botanical Gardens, which overlooks the banks of the Mill River, where Chajara-Tupelo (Tree-Tupelo), a plant from a previous performance, grows after being planted by Rahmoun in 2019; and finally, in nearby West Whately, Ghorfa #13 (Room #13 Here/Now), a life-size room built in the forest and accessible via a hike guided by instructions from Rahmoun to “[ . . . ] take this path, which proceeds counterclockwise, and take it slowly, at the rhythm of nature, to synchronize with the speed of the earth that turns around the sun.”

Here, Now makes for a meditative and itinerant viewing experience, immersing visitors in nearly three decades of artistic practice while also facilitating a meandering and poignant inquiry into questions of migration, the environment, and how creative practice operates interstitially between the two. The exhibition’s interpretive strategy situates each work within his career trajectory and reminds the viewer of the possibility of an almost playful interaction with the objects, from the invitation to “step inside” the larger-than-life size Markaba, or upon learning that museum staff assisted in folding paper boats for the installation Markib (Boat). Like Kemmoussa, Markib also includes ninety-nine components, this time in the shape of the paper boats lit up by green LED lights that hang from the ceiling, yet appear to be floating in mid-air. Despite its multi-sitedness, the curatorial choices showcase an impactful consistency that enhances visitors’ experiences: across the various installations and objects, viewers are invited to understand Rahmoun’s visual vernacular across different media and stages in his career development.

Certain works are also contextualized as expressions of historical or political engagement. The label for Markaba tells us that its materiality is reminiscent of weaponry, pointing to the history of colonial violence endured by citizens of the Rif Mountains between 1921 and 1926. The 2003 work, Intifada (Uprising)—a haunting wall installation featuring white cloth shrouds compressed into bundles—alludes to the brutality and violence endured during the second Palestinian intifada, between 2000 and 2005. As the label outlines, this years-long event, now over two decades old, caused Rahmoun to question the role of artists in society and the impact of art in the face of violence of such magnitude. In 2025, looking up at the installation hung well overhead, it is impossible not to connect the taut white cloth mounds with the painfully frequent contemporary imagery of deceased bodies, their shadows looming like gravestones over their outstretched surface.

While the selective discussion of the political and the regional throughout the exhibition provides useful background for Rahmoun’s worldview, it would have been enriched by a firmer grounding of his spiritual practice and Islamic devotional thought. The essays in the extensive and outstanding trilingual (Arabic, French, and English) exhibition catalog, Younès Rahmoun: Here Now, edited by Emma Chubb, Smith College Museum of Art Charlotte Feng Ford ’83 Curator of Contemporary Art and published in June 2024, focus on such spirituality as a major argumentative thrust of the artist’s work. It is perhaps best exemplified in the audio from the video installation Wahid (One) (2003), which permeates the first floor of the museum installation. The screen centers on the artist’s hands, which emerge from a black djellab (long loose garment with wide sleeves and hood typically worn in Morocco) that also hangs above. In a gesture reminiscent of counting prayer beads, Rahmoun’s index finger moves across his palm, marking each time the word wahid is repeated, ninety-nine. While the label narrates the origins of piece as a performance and describes the screen, which rests on a carpet, as a surrogate for the body of the artist, the title and content of this work has clear links to Muslim worship, as ninety-nine may also refer to the number of names for Allah, or God, of which wahid, quite literally, is one.

As Omer Berrada’s essay argues, Rahmoun’s work is a “de-secularised extension” of the work of Moroccan modernists such as the Casablanca group, and has roots in the artist’s knowledge of the Islamic tradition, including dhikr ceremonies, often translated as ritual prayers or litanies (A Breathing Circle of Light: The Work of Younès Rahmoun, in Younès Rahmoun: Here Now, 36–37). This act of religious supplication may be what suffuses the “here, now” across the exhibition’s various manifestations, as their minimalist outlines and iterative forms are part of a spiritual process that becomes “a broadening of the field of consciousness, an evolution, a mutation” (A Breathing Circle of Light, 38–39). The repeated geometric shapes found in Rahmoun’s work, such as in Nakhla-Saghira and Markaba, for instance, might also inscribe themselves within often recognizable ornamental modes of Islamic art—the only subfield in art history to be designated by its religious affiliation.

As displays and collections of contemporary art from the Arab world have grown in the past decades, scholars and curators have noted persistent tropes in their presentation and reception. In the United States in particular, this might range from an orientalist treatment to the instrumentalization of the work as a bridge towards cultural understanding in the context of enduring Islamophobia. Within this thorny and often politicized landscape, one might see the importance of distancing the ‘Islamic’ from contemporary artistic production, particularly for audiences who may not be familiar with the region, language, or the artist. Rahmoun’s approach to religion and Islam, however, is not merely thematic, but rather encompasses an entire methodology that is not easily condensed into a text destined for broad readership. Nevertheless, one might argue that the opportunity to see his provocative body of work through the lens of spirituality could further enhance his call for collective contemplation on nature, place, and diaspora, and our places within them.