Frac Occitanie Montpellier to present Mohamed Lekleti’s first major monographic exhibition in France

Frac Occitanie Montpellier will present 'En déséquilibre / في اختلال التوازن', a solo exhibition by Mohamed Lekleti, from 25 September to 23 December 2026. The opening is scheduled for Thursday 24 September at 18:00 in the gallery on rue Rambaud in Montpellier. The institution says the project is organised within Saison Méditerranée 2026 and also forms part of Saison du Dessin 2026, initiated by Paréidolie and the Château de Servières in Marseille.

The Frac describes the exhibition as the first monographic presentation of this scale in France for Lekleti, a Moroccan artist who lives in Montpellier. According to the museum, the show will bring together a large mural produced on site and several works on paper, arranged as a single ensemble. The installation will be linked by drawn or real threads, some visible and some more discreet, creating a network that connects the different pieces.

Lekleti’s visual language, as outlined by the Frac, includes targets and circular machines, microphones, numbers and mathematical formulas, storm clouds, breaths, images of war, children’s games, hands, hybrid bodies, twin or strained figures, doubled faces evoking Janus, and migrants or men of power. The institution says his work is built mainly from black and white, though some compositions can include colour, material, or collage. The artist also works across a range of techniques, including charcoal, graphite, ink, acrylic, pastel, photography, digital printing, sewing, and textile elements.

The exhibition will also include objects, which the Frac says Lekleti uses to occupy space: resin sculptures, stuffed birds referenced to Farîd-ud-Dîn ‘Attâr’s 'Cantique des oiseaux', ancestral Moroccan property titles engraved in wood, wigs, African masks, and prayer rugs. The gallery installation is intended to create the impression that the images and objects are floating, with neither people nor animals nor things touching the floor.

The exhibition text says this fragile balance gives the project its title, 'En déséquilibre / في اختلال التوازن'. The Frac presents the show as an environment in which celestial and earthly worlds meet, and in which the eternal and the factual, the timeless and the instant, and the past and present are brought into contact.

Curatorial credit on the exhibition page is given to Éric Mangion. A related note on the Frac’s mailing also states that the project is carried out in partnership with the Fondation nationale des Musées du Maroc and the Musée La Kasbah, Espace d’art contemporain de Tanger, where another Lekleti exhibition is scheduled from 19 June to 30 November 2026 under the curatorship of Abdelaziz El Idrissi. The Montpellier exhibition is also said to involve support from the gallery Le Réservoir in Sète, the Métropole de Montpellier, the Institut Français au Maroc, and a group of named patrons.