GHARIBA

A playful and moving portrait of some women in Morocco. Evoking reality television, home video, and ethnographic film, its visual language is at once intimate and whimsical, with the director’s digital manipulations by turns amplifying and undermining her subjects’ self-presentations. Bennani’s women discuss love and romance, dating and friendship, loneliness and community, all set against the terror of aging.

Meriem Bennani
Meriem Bennani (b. 1988 in Rabat, Morocco) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Juxtaposing and mixing the language of reality TV, documentaries, phone footage, animation, and high production aesthetics, she explores the potential of storytelling while amplifying reality through a strategy of magical realism and humour. She has been developing a shape-shifting practice of films, sculptures and immersive installations, composed with a subtle agility to question our contemporary society and its fractured identities, gender issues and ubiquitous dominance of digital technologies. Bennani’s work has been shown at the Whitney Biennale, MoMA PS1, Art Dubai, The Vuitton Foundation in Paris, Public Art Fund, CLEARING and The Kitchen in New York. Her animated series, 2 Lizards, a collaboration with director Orian Barki, premiered on Instagram during Spring 2020 and was described by The New York Times as “hypnotic…deploying a blend of documentary structure and animation surrealism…both poignantly grounded in actual events and also soothingly fantastical” and its animated protagonists “art stars.” (Jon Caramanica, April 2020)

Meriem Bennani

Meriem Bennani (b. 1988 in Rabat, Morocco) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Juxtaposing and mixing the language of reality TV, documentaries, phone footage, animation, and high production aesthetics, she explores the potential of storytelling while amplifying reality through a strategy of magical realism and humour. She has been developing a shape-shifting practice of films, sculptures and immersive installations, composed with a subtle agility to question our contemporary society and its fractured identities, gender issues and ubiquitous dominance of digital technologies. Bennani’s work has been shown at the Whitney Biennale, MoMA PS1, Art Dubai, The Vuitton Foundation in Paris, Public Art Fund, CLEARING and The Kitchen in New York. Her animated series, 2 Lizards, a collaboration with director Orian Barki, premiered on Instagram during Spring 2020 and was described by The New York Times as “hypnotic…deploying a blend of documentary structure and animation surrealism…both poignantly grounded in actual events and also soothingly fantastical” and its animated protagonists “art stars.” (Jon Caramanica, April 2020)

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