Fatima Agoula (b. 1998, NL) is an interdisciplinary artist, stylist and director. Born and raised in Zaandijk, she is the daughter of Moroccan migrants, who left the Atlas Mountains in the eighties.
Feeling an urgency to revisit the places she went to in her childhood to go back before she won’t recognise her dreams. This sense of loss enhances the idea of going back to a time in the past. Fatima wishes to use her practice to reflect on the world as it is today, to continue raising critical questions while simultaneously bringing her passion to connecting with each other into the dynamic and fast changing world.
Her approach is based upon the intersectional exploration of her identity, in which her work centers around the interplay between womanhood, her African identity, her religious views from the Qur’an and the politics of fashion.
While studying Moving Image at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, specialising primarily in storytelling and with a keen interest in Audiovisual art, she simultaneously spent her time exploring the fashion industry in Amsterdam. Her interest lies on the impact class, race, religion and geography have on fashion and its politics, which leads her to questioning the ‘neutrality of clothing’.
For her audiovisual installation ‘Nothing but a test’, she unpacks the consequences of current clichés and accepted narratives on the Muslim woman and explores the meaning of life and death in Islam. With a focus on Angels in Islam and their connection to (the glimpse of) death during life, she focuses on the impact this has on life. She turned the storytelling around by creating the installation from the perspective of a Muslim woman.