Meriem Bennani

Meriem Bennani explores complex themes such as cultural disparities, contemporary politics, the exchange of information, and censorship. Her work unfolds the visual language she has become renowned for, sourced in highly recognisable contemporary forms such as reality television, home videos, documentaries, social media, and lo-fi phone footage. Bennani develops her practice across film, installation, and immersive environments, often confronting references to globalised consumer and popular culture – music, reality TV, fashion – with the vernacular of her native Morocco’s traditions and aesthetics. Using magical realism, absurdist humour, détournement, and the re- or misappropriation of cultural clichés, she crafts a complex world where viewers are invited into an amplified version of reality.

In key series such as Cursed Objects, Bennani conceives a suite of moving sculptures that expand her signature film practice into physical space. Crafted from domestic materials and employing animatronics used in theme parks, these mobile, anthropomorphic figures – adorned with belts, whips, chains, artificial plants, doormats, and brooms – pay homage to the Moroccan cultural phenomenon Routini Lyawmi, where everyday household scenes are shared on social media. Through expansive and serialistic video works such as Party on the CAPS, Bennani treats socio-political notions of surveillance, power, and displacement with her idiosyncratic blend of wit and surrealism.

Across film and sculpture alike, Meriem Bennani speaks of the porosities that exist between our two- and three-dimensional lives: while we construct our identities through the prism of screens, her work suggests that, in a humour-infused inversion, elements from the imaginary world may surface within our physical landscape. Over the past years, Bennani has established herself as one of the foremost voices of her generation, blending loud, lo-fi aesthetics with storytelling that remains at once critical and complex.