By Safaa Abou El Houda
Casablanca, – A great lover of the visual arts and writing, Shams Sahbani is a painter with a thousand and one facets, always in search of new and rich experiences with a style that is both pictorial and literary specific to this young woman. active and creative.
A great lover of literature, a graduate of Al Akhawayn University, she carried out higher education from 2001 to 2005 at Hassan II University, before setting off to discover China, where she taught English to Jinzhou University of Technology, becoming an English-speaking consultant at Jinzhou Bank.
Back in Morocco in 2007, Shams Sahbani joined the Higher Council for Education and Training, then the Ministry of Youth, Culture and Communication in November 2018.
The visual arts and writing have always been an integral part of his life with diversified interests. If Shams Sahbani is a rather shy and reserved woman, who avoids the spotlight, she brings out, with finesse and subtlety, the beauty of her imagination through writing and painting.
From an early age, this renowned painter turned to reading and writing, as well as word games, which was one of her passions.
In kindergarten, she recalls in a statement to MAP, she had already won the 1st prize for a drawing she had titled “What I like”. But it was not until 2015 that she really took an interest in painting professionally, and began to exhibit her works of art, following the painting lessons she took in workshops of well-known painters in national scale.
Shams Sahbani will link artistic participations and exhibitions. Her participation in the “Art Tentation” fair in Monaco did not go unnoticed, just as she will shine at the exhibition organized, in El Jadida in 2018, by the Higher Council for Education and the exhibition “Le choc des emotions “.
In addition to a means of expressing and sharing messages, intentions, feelings and ideas, the visual arts are, for Shams Sahbani, “another means of sharing happiness and joy with individuals and communities of different backgrounds”, essentially using primary colors including red, yellow and blue, she reveals.
Thanks to her dexterity, she quickly managed to mix shapes, colors and materials to create her own artistic and pictorial universe.
Shams Sahbani conceives of writing as another means of expression and sharing of feelings to the point that these two vocations (painting and writing) have become inseparable for her.
In 2022, she publishes a book entitled “Artists painters in Casablanca”, which is the result of several years of reflection and research in the field. This book also constitutes an interesting documentary base, ordered thematically and based on interviews carried out between 2020 and 2022 with painters, who live and work in Casablanca.
For the future, she is preparing several projects including a collective exhibition initiated by seven women, and entitled “Vécus de femmes”, scheduled from March 4 to 11, 2023 at the Anfa Cultural Complex in Casablanca.
In the meantime, the artist-writer is working to finish her second book, still on visual artists, but which this time covers all of Morocco. The book will be released in French and/or English, and will be accompanied by a series of exhibitions that highlight the artists and not their works only.
Shams Sahbani has been awarded several prizes, including the public prize in an abstract painting competition in Toulouse, and the silver medal in the international competition for professional artists, organized by the Mondial Art Academy, of which she was made Knight .
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