'Wind from the North', Moroccan artist Amine El Gotaibi's first solo exhibition with Southern Guild, sees him turn to wind as a force capable of crossing borders, carrying memory, and reshaping landscapes.
Opening at the gallery’s Tribeca location on Friday, November 6, 2026, the exhibition introduces a new body of work spanning sculpture, installation, and works on paper, in which copper, wool, ink, and earth give material form to movement. Rooted in El Gotaibi’s longstanding engagement with the mountains and deserts of Morocco and North Africa, the exhibition considers the instability of geographic and ideological boundaries, and what happens when the landscapes through which we locate ourselves are set in motion.
The exhibition’s title refers not simply to a direction or geography, but to a force that cannot be contained by either. “Wind knows neither North nor South. Neither East nor West,” says El Gotaibi. “It moves freely across territories, indifferent to the categories that divide them.” For the artist, this offers a way to probe the contradictions of geographic classification. His native Morocco occupies the northern edge of Africa, yet belongs to a continent broadly situated within the charged geopolitical construct of the Global South.
Wind from the North
inhabits this paradox, treating such coordinates not as immutable truths but as inherited systems open to question.
The exhibition expands upon ideas that have been central to El Gotaibi’s practice for more than a decade: territory, the relationship between nature and society, and the opposing forces of polarity and balance that coexist within human civilisation. Here, wind enters this established vocabulary as an agent of change. Familiar silhouettes of mountains and deserts are eroded, displaced, and reconfigured, while the materials themselves bear evidence of environmental and human intervention.
Southern Guild — New York