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Meriem Bennani's Exploded Visions

June 23, 2017

Can art be funny and serious at the same time? Using social media-inspired effects, artist Meriem Bennani subverts audience expectations of both pop culture and her own Muslim community with unexpected playfulness and pathos. “I feel like I have a hard time connecting to anything that doesn’t have humor,” says the artist, “because for me humor is like survival.”

Taking cues from digital platforms, in her multichannel video installation FLY, Bennani inserts a mischievous Rihanna-singing fly over footage of daily life in her native Morocco. Projected over sculpted surfaces that mimic the compound vision of flies themselves, the effect is startlingly disorienting in its comic mash up of specific cultural details and cartoonish digital tropes.

Often exploring the private lives of Muslim women, Bennani strategically navigates the line between championing and exploiting the women who appear in her films, many of whom are family members, like in her documentary-style project Ghariba/Stranger. “On one side, I almost feel emotionally like a monster who traps family members into this digital world. And then the other extreme is like fully loving and celebrating family,” says the artist.

Bennani’s largest project to date—a thirty-second video loop of women in festive “holiday” hijabs created for the massive outdoor oculus screen at Barclays Center in Brooklyn—is both an unabashed celebration of feminine Muslim culture and a negotiation of her own identity as a secular Moroccan in a polarized political climate. “What this political climate does is that it asks you to think about your identity constantly,” says the artist. “And I feel like my reaction to that has been to make work that itself doesn’t stick to a genre or one identity.”

More information and credits

Credits

New York Close Up Series: Producer Nick Ravich. Director: Nesa Azimi & Adam Golfer. Editor: Adam Golfer & Anita Hei-Man Yu. Cinematography: Adam Golfer. Additional Camera: Meriem Bennani. Design & Graphics: Open & Urosh Perisic. Artwork Courtesy: Meriem Bennani. Music Courtesy: ISSAM, Jabo & JEUNECARTIER. Thanks: Art Dubai, ARTE, Orian Barki, Ted Beagles, Bravo Studios, Brooklyn Sports & Entertainment, Sandrine Milet, Public Art Fund, & Ava Taylor. © Art21, Inc. 2017. All Rights Reserved.

New York Close Up is supported, in part, by The Lambent Foundation; public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council; VIA Art Fund; Lévy Gorvy; and by individual contributors.

Closed captionsAvailable in English, German, Romanian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Italian

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Licensing

Interested in showing this film in an exhibition or public screening? To license this video please visit Licensing & Reproduction.

Meriem Bennani

Meriem Bennani was born in 1988, in Rabat, Morocco and today lives and works in New York City, New York. Bennani received her BFA from The Cooper Union in 2012 after receiving her MFA in Animation from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, France in 2011. Moving between the aesthetics of reality television, documentary, animation and more, Bennani’s videos and installations embrace play and the absurd, while contemplating the intricacies of human behavior.

“I use footage as material, and not for its real content, but really using it as material in the direction that is completely disconnected with its reality.”

Meriem Bennani

Meriem Bennani's Holiday Headscarf

Meriem Bennani’s 30-second video piece Your Year by Fardaous Funjab features an “advertisement” for the artist’s fictional hijab design.


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