Every Friday at noon this summer, non profit Art21 is premiering a new film about a contemporary artist you should know about for their Summer of Shorts series. This week features Moroccan-born and Brooklyn-based video artist, Meriem Bennani.
Born in Rabat, Morocco, 29 year-old artist Meriem Bennani's work has been exhibited internationally, including at Saatchi Gallery in London, Palais de Tokyo in Paris and The Jewish Museum in New York. And now she's giving us a first-person account of how her major works came to be, where she draws inspiration from and talks her current Snapchat-inspired multichannel video installation FLY. Now showing at MoMA PS1, FLY completely obliterates the 'normal' Western expectations of Muslim culture and women with unexpected humor.
In addition to inserting a 3D Rihanna-singing fly over footage of daily life in Morroco, Meriem uses her own family members as a way to explore the private lives of Muslim women, and ultimately disrupt the ideas we project upon them. Also having used her family for her previous documentary-style project Ghariba/Stranger, she reveals that "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."
Ultimately, Meriem aims to use humor in her work as a way to confront not so funny subjects while also shedding light on an underrepresented culture in a smart, innovative way. “I feel like I have a hard time connecting to anything that doesn’t have humor,” she reveals, “because for me humor is like survival.
Check out the video exclusive from Art21 below:
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