Hamza Halloubi

Its throat is parched with thirst, but it would not accept a single drop of water from alien hands

13 September 2025 - 1 March 2026
work in collection

From 13 September 2025, De Pont Museum in Tilburg will present a double première by Moroccan-Belgian artist Hamza Halloubi (1982). In addition to Halloubi’s first feature film Vizor (2024), which deals with insurmountable dilemmas in life and art, his most recent group of works – centred on the fate of Mehdi Ben Barka (1920-1965) – will be displayed as well. Through a poignant and poetic installation, Halloubi explores the role of art in a late-stage capitalist society.

Halloubi was inspired by the mystery surrounding the disappearance of Mehdi Ben Barka (1920-1965), a prominent Moroccan politician who was last seen in Paris in 1965. Ben Barka was a revolutionary who openly denounced the monarchy, advocated for a democratic and anti-colonial Moroccan state and was a major driving force behind the Tricontinental Conference, an international gathering of liberation movements from Africa, Asia and Latin America. During a 2020 radio interview, the Israeli investigative journalist (and recent Pulitzer winner) Ronen Bergman asserted that Ben Barka had been murdered and, with the help of the Israeli secret service, buried at the site where the Fondation Louis Vuitton has stood since 2014. The Fondation is a private museum for modern and contemporary art founded by multibillionaire Bernard Arnault.

Halloubi took the alleged location of Ben Barka’s body as the starting point for the stirring 3-D animated film which forms the core of the new group of works. In the film, Halloubi shows the spirit of the opposition leader wandering through the empty Fondation Louis Vuitton building – a symbol of the tangled relationship between art and late-stage capitalism – while questioning the situation aloud. As a result, Ben Barka’s story becomes a philosophical reflection that confronts us with ethical issues pertaining to the society in which we live, where economic interests seem to take priority over people and ideals.

Vizor (2024)

In Halloubi’s first feature film, Vizor, the protagonist finds out he has unwittingly married his sister. Confused by his feelings toward his wife and son, and tormented by the insurmountable dilemma, the man runs away. This is just one of the film’s loosely connected and open-ended parallel narratives, which deal with corruption, gentrification and the complex nature of Moroccan society. Like the relationship in which the protagonist is trapped, however, each of these stories ultimately arrives at an impasse. Through Vizor, Halloubi explores the limits of film as a medium, devoting attention to both the creative process and his own doubts about the meaning and relevance of art in the broader sense.

Halloubi deploys unorthodox camera work to depict the inner conflict that runs like a red thread through the film. At times, for instance, he literally turns the world on its ear; he also alternates between colour and black and white and uses the reflective visor of a helmet to show us the passing landscape. In Vizor, Halloubi offers a visually powerful meditation on the irresolvable situations with which life confronts us.

_{Start times:
11:30, 13:00, and 14:30.
Thursday evenings: 16:00 and 17:30 (except during Punch).}

About Hamza Halloubi

Hamza Halloubi (1982, Morocco) lives and works in Brussels. Walking a fine line between reality and fiction, his videos, installations and paintings interweave personal stories with a collective history. By doing so, the artist renders current issues like cultural identity, migration and post-colonialism tangible in an intuitive and poetic manner. Other recurring themes are the creative struggle, along with the relevance of art and what it means to be an artist in today's world. De Pont Museum organised the first solo museum exhibition of Halloubi's work in 2015 and has since added eight of his works to the collection.

In the auditorium, visitors can learn more about the artist via the short documentary Hamza Halloubi: In His Own Words, in which Halloubi talks about his work, the present exhibition and his personal views on art.

^{_{The works in the exhibition were made possible in part through the support of
Moussem, nomadic arts centre, Brussels and Flemish Community}}