Palma: The Conference of the Palm Trees. Artist Mehdi-Georges Lahlou and curator Virginie Puertolas-Syn in conversation.

By PETRA MASON April 21st, 2026

Serendipity (or divine intervention) led me to the cascading ceramic work titled ‘Date Palm Tree’ 2026 by French-Moroccan artist Mehdi-Georges Lahlou earlier this year in North Africa at 1-54 Marrakech 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair. A few weeks later, on the Southern-most tip of Africa, fortuitousness (or lady luck) led me to curator Virginie Puertolas-Syn who was in South Africa for the Investec Cape Town Art Fair https://www.investeccapetownartfair.co.za.

While 1-54 Marrakech was the artist's first at that particular fair, visiting South Africa was a first for the curator. As art worlds collide, disrupting events and happy accidents joyfully revealed that Puertolas-Syn (also an Asia NOW Ambassador) was en route to open Mehdi-Georges Lahlou’s first exhibition in Singapore and Asia. WM contributor [since 2016] Petra Mason caught up with Mehdi-Georges Lahlou and Virginie Puertolas-Syn long-distance to evesdrop on the artist and curator in conversation. 

Mehdi-Georges Lahlou, Petit Rameau, 2022 

VPS: This is your first exhibition in Singapore and Asia. The work draws on Farid ud-Din Attar’s 12th-century Sufi poem The Conference of the Birds. Why this city, and what happens when you replace birds with palm trees?

MGL: Singapore is extraordinary because the tension I work with is so visible here — and yet so seamlessly managed it almost disappears. Palm trees line the expressways, frame civic buildings, punctuate every development. That harmony is curated; nothing is accidental. As for Attar’s poem — birds migrate by choice. Palm trees do not. They are made to migrate, uprooted and replanted across centuries of colonial expansion. Though palms have also been displaced by natural forces — the sea, animals, the wind — long before any human hand intervened. That substitution transforms the allegory. The journey becomes layered — neither purely voluntary nor purely enforced.

VPS: So the palm tree becomes something more than a botanical subject?

MGL: It becomes an archive. Palm trees have existed for over a hundred million years — they knew the dinosaurs; they are, in fact, giant grasses. As an artiste engagé — a politically committed artist — I am drawn to their double register: the symbolic weight of paradise and sacred landscape alongside the less visible histories of colonial circulation and environmental vulnerability. They are witnesses — to extraction, to domination, to the way human systems have instrumentalized the natural world.

Mehdi-Georges Lahllou, Still Life, 2026

VPS: Singapore also uses palms commercially — in tourism, luxury hospitality, global branding. Does that enter the work?

MGL: The palm sells an entirely constructed idea of the tropics. The indigenous palms of Singapore — mangrove and understorey species, discreet and almost invisible — look nothing like the monumental palms that define the city’s visual identity. Those arrived through colonial plant circulation in the 19th century and were massively replanted under the Garden City policy of the 1960s. That stratification — between local ecology and the political construction of landscape — is central to my work.

VPS: What do you hope visitors take with them when they leave?

MGL: Perhaps a slight shift in perception. The palm tree is ultimately a metaphor for human displacement — for the trajectories people carry and the consequences they leave behind. Plants are not decorative; they are witnesses to circulations and lives. Looking at them through a botanical lens might prompt reflection on one’s own constructions — how we think about others, about gender, ecology, colonial legacies. I am not here to deliver a lesson. Plants do not provide answers. But they open a space where these questions can be approached with maybe greater clarity. Those palms outside this gallery are a kind of language. I hope visitors leave wanting to read it through them.

Mehdi-Georges Lahlou Birds of Paradise, 2026

Tapestry mounted on wood, 120 x 185 x 4,5cm 

Cuturi Gallery Singapore

Palma:The Conference of the Palm Trees 

Solo Exhibition by Mehdi-Georges Lahlou 

Curated by Virginie Puertolas-Syn

Exhibtion ends May 9, 2026 

https://www.cuturigallery.com