Naima Morelli

It was a pleasure to contribute three pieces to the new issue of HADARA, a very stylish and elegant magazine from the Gulf. I wrote a piece on the Islamic Biennale, I spoke with the design studio Karim+Elias, and investigated the work of the young promising artist Mariem Abu Taleb.

You’ll find the magazine in newstands and the pieces online here.

My piece on the Islamic Biennale

The article on the design studio Karim+Elias

A piece on artist Mariem Abu Taleb

Across Paris, contemporary Vietnamese artists have also been making their presence felt, represented by galleries such as Galerie BAO and A2Z Art Gallery and showing at art fairs like Asia Now (Europe’s only fair focused on Asian artists). Taken together, these various presentations point towards a cultural conversation between the two countries that stretches back to colonial times. 

I have written a piece on Vietnamese art during the Paris Art Week for Plural Art Mag.

Here is the link to the article

My second article for the Art Newspaper France is “Gérôme in Qatar: an updated look at Orientalism.”

With the exhibition “Seeing is Believing: The Art and Influence of Gérôme” at the Mathaf – Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha, Qatar is positioning itself as the bridgehead for a new chapter in the history of Orientalism.

Here is the link to the piece

It’s always good to be published on paper! My latest piece for the literary magazine Mekong Review is a piece on contemporary art in Bali beyond tourism, featuring Satya Cipta, Marco Cassani, Citra Sasmita, CushCush Gallery and more.

Get a copy of the magazine here

For Palestinian artist Rana Samara, intimacy is not just about love and sex, but is rather a mixture of connection, comfort and feeling at home, as her latest exhibition at Zawyeh Gallery in Dubai in 2022, Inner Sanctuary, aptly demonstrated. I spoke with her for The Markaz Review.

Here is the link to the interview

Finally we are in that part of the year where we start looking back and planning for the future. As everyone who has been around me lately knows too well, this year I went all in into the reviewing and the planning. Never was I so serious about it – I guess because it’s so much fun for me!

The reflecting phase started already from the 1st of December. I had just came back from a swirlwind of trips in end of October beginning of November – Paris, Budapest, Abu Dhabi and Riyadh literally one after the other – and even had to say no to two more, very enticing press trips to Khazakistan and Qatar. But I was exausted. I had to stop and digest all my experiences. So as soon as I put my suitcase on the parquet of my home in Pigneto, Rome, I de-installed the social media from my phone, and decided to go full into the reviewing/planning process. 

I wrote an article for The New Arab about the Paris Art Week. Unquestionably one of the most important art events in Europe this year, the Paris Art Week, happened from 16 to 22 October.

Given the international climate, what was expected was for shows and art fairs to have an emphasis on the situation in Gaza, but this was not the case.

Here is the link to the article

It has been such a long time since I last indulged in some personal reflections on this blog, and let you readers know what’s up with my life and my different practices. I felt it was high time, so I have started writing this personal essay on the train ride from Naples to Venice, and I have finished it in my hometown Sorrento, in preparation for being back in my turf, Rome. 

The train journey from Naples to Venice was six hours, which I usually spend reading, listening to music, podcasts, and calling friends sometimes. But six hours of uninterrupted trip, crossing Italy from South to North, are a gift of sorts. You are launched at full speed in a beautiful landscape, there is movement and stillness, a precious time to gather your thoughts, in preparation for a fresh start. A time for aimless pleasure, for allowing reflections to form. What will come will be the time for activity, and both the leisure – the otium of the Romans – and the action-filled, execution part, need to be appreciated fully. If you train your sensitivity, you’ll know when and how to flow from one state to another. This is ultimately the sense I’ve been sharpening these past few months.

What a pleasure to chat with Joana Alarcão from Insights of an Eco Artist podcast. The first part was released a few weeks ago, and now the second part is out!

Here is the link to the second part of the podcast