The artist and curator Hanne Lise Thomsen had originally invited professor Anette Abrahamsson from The Schools of Visual Arts’ School of Painting to exhibit at work at the Billboard Festival Casablanca, which took place on 1 to 15 April 2015.
Anette Abrahamsson went on to involve eight of her students, inviting them to exhibit their work on eight of the total of 63 billboards that Hanne Lise Thomsen had rented for this event; Casablanca is full of billboards, so the signs themselves were already in place.
Two of the students featured in this exhibition, Kinga Bartis and Coline Morotta, went to Casablanca prior to and during the exhibition period. The two Danish art students had a enjoyable and fruitful stay, but also experienced something of a culture clash – partly in relation to the locals, who are so used to outdoor advertisements that many assumed that the works of art were simply advertising something, and partly in their encounter with a very different tradition of fine art education that puts much less emphasis on independent work and study.
See all the billboards and read more about the Billboard Festival Casablanca here