A sprawling exhibition at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, takes viewers not just across campus, but also on a hike. With themes of nature, spirituality and more, the works found in “Here, Now” engage viewers in more ways than one.
After driving past cattle and sheep farms lining Poplar Hill Road in West Whately, hikers journeying to the Ada and Archibald MacLeish Field Station have plenty of options.
But from now until mid-July 2025, if you take the two-mile loop spanning the Homestead and Mountain Laurel Trails – a small, near-transparent room awaits you along the final stretch.
Tucked away on a hillside in a small clearing is a wooden structure – about the size of a large pantry. Walled with window panes and a door reminiscent of a greenhouse, its unique dimensions and flooring holds hints of an intimate living space.
It’s “Ghorfa #13,” part of a series in which Moroccan artist Younes Rahmoun, in-part, replicates the private, meditative space he kept in his family’s home – not large enough to fully stand in, but big enough to hold the essentials of his life and art.
It was commissioned for the exhibit hosted by the Smith College Museum of Art – a mid-career retrospective for the 49-year-old artist who Curator of Contemporary Art Emma Chubb says works across disciplines. Featuring work inspired by his daily life, it’s also his first exhibition in North America.
“The exhibition meanders through the museum and kind of across campus as well, and that's really intentional. It's really growing out of how Younes Rahmoun, as an artist, works - where he often will invest multiple locations with his work,” she explains. “So, … I really wanted to, in bringing his work here, to also have it be set up in a way that it invited multiple points of entry in multiple locations, and have our own movement of our body be something that is part of the experience of his work.”
The works invite contemplation, with heavy emphasis on unique shapes and getting up close and personal.
One such piece is the “Markaba” - which means vessel or unit, Chubb says. It's a large, brass cube adorned with pyramids in the museum that, sitting on tall stands, invites the viewer to pop in from the underside.
Inside, you find a multi-dimensional, mirrored space: perfect for reflecting and reflections alike.
Elsewhere, you can hear one of Rahmoun’s most distinct works before you see it – “Wahid,” an installation featuring a television that shows the artist’s hands seemingly sitting in a void – fingers moving as he repeats the word “wahid,” Arabic for 1, 99 times in 99 seconds.
“So, I think he hasn't talked about it in this way, but I think there's this real nice play on the idea of the hands of the artist, which are these, often … kind of exalted parts of an artist's body,” the curator says. “But for him, this is also this kind of echo of the kind of ‘and one, and one, and one,’ and so, the idea of the present or coming into the present moment, this kind of repetition of time, that he's always in this eternal present with the loop, too, of the video.”
Another space for contemplation isn’t far from the museum.
Inside the nearby Lyman Plant House and the Botanic Garden is a sectioned off, darkened space that hosts “Habba,” an animation that, with serene, yet haunting music, shows a seed slowly, frame by frame, burst with life, only for a cycle to run its course - the seed is eventually consumed by oblivion before the sequence starts anew.
There are other installations around campus, as well. As Chubb says, it’s also an ongoing effort to invite visitors to see another world that another person has decided to share.
“I think we've made that happen with this exhibition, and I think that that is a world that invites a lot of questions around what it means to be, in relation with other people, with the Earth, with other entities, such as … the spiritual world, with oneself…” she adds.
The exhibition runs through July 13, 2025.
