Blank Forms 7th Annual Gala Honoring Latifa Echakhch and Kahil El'Zabar

On Wednesday, November 13th, Blank Forms presents its seventh annual benefit gala honoring visionary artists Latifa Echakhch and Kahil El'Zabar. Our yearly gala raises crucial funds for new commissions, public programs, publishing and archival initiatives. For more information, please contact Corinne Daniel: corinne@blankforms.org

LATIFA ECHAKHCH is a Moroccan-French visual artist currently based in the Swiss city of Vevey. She is known for a startling body of paintings, sculptures, and installations that explore the cascading, multitudinous meanings of everyday materials, examining themes including migration, conflict, and memory. Born in El Khnansa in 1974, Echakhch and her family relocated to France when she was three. She attended the École supérieure d’Art de Grenoble and later received degrees from the National School of Arts Cergy-Pontoise and the Lyon National School of Fine Arts, and began her studio practice in 2001. In 2007, Le Magasin in Grenoble presented her first solo museum exhibition, which included her defining early installation À chaque stencil une revolution (For Each Stencil a Revolution). With a title borrowed from a comment by Palestinian resistance leader Yasser Arafat (1929-2004) on the May 1968 French student uprisings, the piece tiles dyed carbon paper, a common medium of 1960s leaflets, throughout the room, treated with alcohol that causes the blue ink to lift, drip, and pool on the floor—an elegy for a revolutionary moment and a wink to Yves Klein. In other works, she has similarly repurposed charged materials, including a partially felled theater canvas, its lower half crumpled out onto the gallery floor (La dépossession, 2014); the diacritic markings left over from erased Arabic poetry (Noise and Missing Words, 2014); and—in a 2022 collaborative exhibition with photographer Zineb Sedira at the Kunsthaus Baselland—assorted objects like wineglasses, cigarette packs, discarded running sneakers, and LPs (including Robert Wyatt’s Rock Bottom and Brian Eno’s Another Green World). 

Throughout her work, Echakhch has explored the role of sound as a social practice, citing composers such as Alvin Curran, Ryoji Ikeda, and Terre Thaemlitz as an influence. Chosen to represent Switzerland at the 59th Venice Biennale, Echakhch explicitly took up musical aesthetics, enlisting percussionist Alexandre Babel and curator and former DJ Francesco Stocchi. “Music is more directly linked to the idea of time passing,” she has said. “You can feel it in your body. When you share a painting or sculpture, you see the world around you and you give it back through your artwork. This process of sharing music is much more immediate.” In the resulting pavilion, titled The Concert (2022), humanoid sculptures evoking fire rituals and folk customs, made from recycled material from previous biennales, filled a darkened room illuminated like a glowing ember by Babel’s contribution, a percussive score then delivered in light rather than sound. Echakhch’s long standing interest in time, memory, and change—arcing between the political and the everyday—here finds a center of gravity in cycles of destruction and rebirth. At Art Basel in 2023, her fascination with sonic catharsis bloomed into deconstructed stage plot with rotating performances co-curated with La Becque | Artist Residency director Luc Meier, featuring artists such as Alvin Curran, Leila Bourdreuil, Oren Ambarchi, Moor Mother, Rhys Chatham, and Robert Longo. For Echakhch, these recent projects bridging visual and ephemeral art have confirmed an invigorating, cross-disciplinary kinship. “The things I put on display in my installations are a polyphonic weave of feelings that could be contradictory: joy, sadness, expectation, disappointment – all very common,” she says. “This possibility of direct emotional experience is something music offers: emotions are transferred and felt as a kind of endless braid.”

Spiritual jazz legend DR. KAHIL EL'ZABAR has been at the center of Chicago’s avant-garde scene for over half a century. Since founding the Ethnic Heritage Ensemble in 1973, El’Zabar has primarily been described as a percussionist, but his multifaceted musical talents go well beyond such a summary. As a bandleader, vocalist, composer, conductor, and educator, El’Zabar has nurtured an extraordinary musical universe—one rooted in Chicago’s South Side and opening out onto the cosmos. A center in himself, his gravity has pulled myriad collaborators into its expansive orbit, including heavyweights Pharoah Sanders, Nina Simone, Dizzy Gillespie, Archie Shepp, Stevie Wonder, Eddie Harris, Lester Bowie, Paul Simon, Billy Bang, and Neneh Cherry among them. 

Born in the Windy City to parents who had migrated from the South, El’Zabar (née Clifton Henry Blackburn, Jr.) has enjoyed a winding career, cultivating an unequaled presence as a rare frontman on drums. At the tender age of four, El’Zabar began playing a bebop kit his father had in the basement, eventually switching to hand percussion at age fourteen. By the early 1970s, El’Zabar had begun to make a living playing as a session musician for the likes of Dionne Warwick, Donny Hathaway, and the Pharaohs, while beginning to immerse himself in the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) milieu, with visionary players such as Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre, Roscoe Mitchell, Malachi Favors, and George E. Lewis all living within a few blocks of him. Recounting how Muhal Richard Abrams would pick him up in a station wagon for band practice with stalwarts like Henry Threadgill and Steve McCall, it’s no wonder El’Zabar eschewed the journeyman life of a pop-soul rhythm-keeper in favor of this bold new style’s siren call. 

As many of the group’s first wave left Chicago for New York, El’Zabar was thrust into the role of chair of the organization at the age of 22. In this same period, the young percussionist founded the now fifty-year-old Ethnic Heritage Ensemble (EHE), which he describes as “an acoustic improvising ensemble with an African base.” Though it began as a quintet, the group soon mutated into the unusual trio of percussion and two horns, a streamlined outfit for easy touring, and the result of a dream by El’Zabar, imagining an elephant’s head with a rhythm section trunk and dual brass as its ears. A symbol of luck and strength, the pachyderm emblem has served the ensemble well as it evolved through different personnel over the course of its half-a-century history, now held down with Corey Wilkes on trumpet and Alex Harding on baritone saxophone. Even a half century on, El’Zabar shows little sign of slowing down: his performances prove him to be an inimitable force, as he animates his band and audiences alike with dazzling hand drums, buoyant vocals, shamanic stage presence, and improvised conduction. His unparalleled dedication keeps alight a rich creative lineage while continuing to foster a new generation of players, ensuring this fiery musical legacy continues to burn brightly.