Meriem Bennani received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from The Cooper Union (New York) in 2012 after receiving her Master’s in animation from the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs (Paris) in 2011. Moving between the aesthetics of reality television and documentary footage combined with post-internet animations and visual tricks, Bennani’s videos and installations touch upon subjects of diasporic experience, cultural hybridization, and language boundaries. Her works often dramatize and reenact neo-orientalist symbols and trends – such as the Kaftan, the Chicha, or the Oriental dance – which become reframed by a diversity of characters (either inspired from reality or from digital worlds) i.e., through social media, science fiction, and a strong sense of the absurd and the ironic. Bennani’s approach to installation-making is highly experimental and makeshift, claiming for spontaneity and playfulness, as they are based on a multisensory engagement for the spectator – who becomes part of the installation by going through different layers of images and sounds, in a kaleidoscopic experience. Functioning in many ways as multimedia catalysts of our contemporary digital neo-pop culture, her installations make us aware of our role and agency over the fatality of passive consumerism in the age of social media and immediacy.

Typical of Bennani’s practice, her work Mission Teens (2019) raises the critical question of French neocolonialism and soft power over Morocco through the educational system. In part through pop cultural references and anthropomorphized singing houses of gentrified neighborhoods, Bennani follows a group of young Moroccan teenagers from Rabat going to the French school and reflects upon the influence of France in their lives.

Conceived as a utopic space, Bennani’s eight-channel video installation Life on the CAPS (2018-2019) brings us to a preposterous future where immigration is reduced to an island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, to begin a new society. Here the whole island of the CAPS is a performative metaphor for how we think of diasporic movements. Indeed Bennani’s most prolific question has been probably: how can we overcome the binary identity politics of assimilation and belongingness through experimenting a third space, the space in-between, mixing and translating locations and cultures.