Art-O-Rama Marseille Roundup 2025

Ever since the European nomadic biennial Manifesta made port in Marseille for its 2020 edition, the city has been a more popular art world destination. Every year, the last weekend of August sees up-and-coming gallerists and artists flock from all over the world to Marseille to participate in Art-O-Rama. Taking place in the nineteenth-century tobacco-factory-turned-cultural-complex La Friche la Belle de Mai, the contemporary art fair founded eighteen years ago is now anchored in a busier cultural landscape. In 2023, the Musée d’Art Contemporain (mac) reopened in the southern part of the city. A few years earlier, various project spaces sprang up in central neighborhoods like Réformés and Belsunce, some turning into commercial galleries, others eventually closing.

All the while, more and more international artists and cultural workers have settled here, most of them lured by affordable rent, sunny weather, and leftist circles. As such, the cité phocéenne has remained a haven for middle-class people and various diasporas—historically Algerian, Armenian, Italian, and Comorian. More recently, its appeal has extended beyond the cultural field, as well-off Americans (following Europeans and Parisians before them) have set their eyes on this historical immigrant magnet. Puff pieces such as the New York Times’s recent article “36 Hours in Marseille”¹ have emboldened tourists to visit this inexpensive summer spot by flaunting the city’s rocky beaches, natural-wine bars, and small-plates restaurants.
 
As pointed out in a more realistic portrait of Marseille in the May issue of the French journal Trou Noir, both privileged tourists and precarious art workers have—willingly or not, and to different extents—contributed to the gentrification of a city where unfit housing is still common.² Yet La Belle de Mai, the immigrant neighborhood where Art-O-Rama is held, has so far been relatively spared from the influx of financial privilege. Here, collectors are visitors who must adapt to the fair’s location: a cultural cooperative whose entrance is marked by a skate park and a basketball court frequented daily by neighborhood kids.
 
One of the few small-scale fairs in Europe and the third-largest salon in France today, “Arto” (for those in the know) has helped bolster Marseille’s standing, all while staying true to the city’s essence: charming, welcoming, seemingly unassuming, yet deeply experimental. Chiefly devoted to visual arts, the fair also includes Edition and Design sections. This year, it brought together fifty-six participants (mostly galleries, a few publishers, and project spaces), none of which were blue-chip establishments, making the conversations laid back, the artworks affordable, and the displays, at times, daring.
 
Before even entering La Cartonnerie (the large space that hosts the fair), I was greeted by a monumental electric-blue fountain adorned with sprawling chimeras recalling Assyrian sculptures but molded in resin, spitting water into a large pool of red liquid. Through these arresting figures and the continuous circulation of water, local artist Mamali Shafahi’s Hereditary Fountain, Velvet Dream (2022) craftily links the persistence of mythology with a more personal history of transmission—namely the bonds between the artist and his father, Reza, who is also an artist. Presented by Dastan Gallery from Tehran, this uncanny installation falsely led me to believe I would encounter outdoor sculptures throughout the open corridors of La Friche. In reality, Art-O-Rama isn’t equipped to curate a sculpture parcours, but had scattered a few “associated projects” around the city, which were generally hard to locate.
 
Inside, my first highlight was the booth of the Sofia-based gallery Cable Depot, presenting the Swiss artist Gabriela Löffel’s two-channel installation Embedded Language (2013). One video frames an interview that the artist conducted with an executive from a weapons manufacturing company at the firm’s booth at the 2012 International Defense Industry Exhibition in Poland. The setting—at least the white partitions separating slick stands, if not the men in suits chatting next to replicas of missiles—recalls that of any fair. While the parallel between the weapons industry and the arts is never explicitly made, their potential entanglement looms in the background, albeit humorously. Indeed, the adjoining video shows a Canadian dubbing artist, Jean-Luc Montminy, repeating the executive’s selling pitch in Quebecois French. As he translates the exec’s discourse, the voice actor mostly re-creates the mannerisms and hesitations that punctuate it, but at times, he stutters and struggles to mimic them. Ultimately, the work reveals the construction and deconstruction of language and affect, and how communication plays a central part in industries of violence. As one of the few video installations and few bluntly political works at the fair, Embedded Language attracted attention beyond my own, receiving a special mention in the Because of Many Suns prize.
 
Also memorable was the solo presentation of young British Lebanese artist Alia Hamaoui at the booth of Soup London, marking the gallery’s first-ever participation in any fair. Titled Replicant wrapped (2025), a striking veneered wooden bench, referencing the work of Italian designer Ettore Sottsass, stood on a bright-red oval carpet, occupying most of the booth. An elongated and more massive version of the original design, the bench had been altered to recall the seating in a sports locker room—a motif that the artist also distorted in the nearby photomontage Metamorphosed (2025). The key to understanding this alluring display lay in more discreet pieces: four crimson-red faux-crocodile leather bags lay around the booth, with one placed atop the bench. Each slouchy bag was open enough to reveal fragments of counterfeit mosaics that Hamaoui had made in Lebanon. They all replicate ancient Roman mosaics from the second century CE, some of which had suspiciously found their way to the United States, then were repatriated to Lebanon in 2023, only to be exposed as inauthentic by academics, though US authorities repeatedly denied any intentional deception.“³ Fake luxuries and forged artifacts thus cohabitated in Hamaoui’s display, continuing her research on the circulation of archaeological objects, particularly those linked to Phoenician history. Through an excess of fakes, she hints at these objects’ questionable place in the construction of national identity in Lebanon, an inclination in line with the Lebanese artist Ali Cherri and his explorations of “geographies of violence.”⁴
 
Another London gallery premiering at the fair was Alice Amati, with a duo show featuring Annabelle Agbo Godeau and Rike Droescher. While Hamaoui is concerned with the imitation and circulation of artifacts, Droescher plays on the transformation of crafts, while Agbo Godeau focuses on the reproduction and dissemination of images. Agbo Godeau gleans details from film stills, viral YouTube videos, and other, more mysterious archives, then renders them in oil paint on papers and envelopes. Her selections made explicit reference to the story of Verda Byrd, who broke the internet in 2019 as the “African American woman who finds out she’s white.”⁵ These cohabitated with more obscure allusions, which seemed to be taken from early cinema and TV shows centering Black Americans. At Art-O-Rama, these various small-to-medium paintings were taped together, at times overlapping, to form a tapestry of visual material explicating and complicating issues of culture and race.
 
In this writer’s view, the most distinguished presentations were certainly by those making their first appearance, confirming the fair’s trust in under-represented and/or younger gallerists and artists, as pointed out to me by Cable Depot’s founder, Iavor Lubomirov. But while Art-O-Rama is known for its recognition of global under-the-radar talent, the fair has also helped cultivate long-term relationships with local actors. The often (and rightfully) cited Sissi Club, founded as a project space in 2019 before becoming a gallery that also hosts studio spaces for artists, has had a booth at the fair since 2022. This year, it put together yet another polished presentation, with bright still lifes and mysterious landscapes manipulated through collages, filters, and photograms by Marion Ellena, as well as a monumental, airy tapestry by Amalia Laurent.
 
In contrast to the fair’s penchant for experimentation, its public programs seemed relatively timid, save for a couple of screenings, including L’mina, Randa Maroufi’s 2025 short film that premiered a few months ago at the Cannes Film Festival, and panel discussions on the resurgence of medieval iconography within contemporary practices. This may be due to the scarcity of space dedicated to the fair within La Friche, or the sheer number of satellite events occurring in parallel to Art-O-Rama, from the SYSTEMA exhibition and performance festival that has been taking place at Palais Carli for the last four years, to the exhibition dedicated to the graduates of the École des Beaux-Arts de Marseille (this year curated by yours truly), and open studios at Artagon and Ateliers Jeanne Barret. Art-O-Rama’s trust in experimental gallery models and young practices somehow leaves us wanting more—more discursive programs, and more collaborations with the many emerging curatorial collectives that make up Marseille’s countercultural core. As a fair that has nurtured gallerists, curators, and artists internationally, it would be great to see Art-O-Rama reinforce its support of the local scene to truly fulfill its experimental spirit.

Line Ajan is a French Syrian curator and translator currently based in Marseille. Her curatorial research centers on subversive uses of moving image and language to enact dissident politics, focusing notably on feminist approaches, diasporic perspectives, and transnational histories. She has organized exhibitions and programs at the Julia Stoschek Foundation, Berlin and Düsseldorf; the MCA Chicago; Mudam Luxembourg; ArteEast, New York; Pickle Bar, Berlin; and Galerie Imane Farès, Paris, among others. She is part of the editorial collective Qalqalah قلقلة.

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