Meriem Bennani’s movies and multimedia installations spotlight the methods digital applied sciences, networks, and world consumption have reworked our lives, cultures, and relationships. Rasha Omar’s work depict the distinction between actuality, comparable to wars and conflicts, and utopian goals, reflecting her expertise of dwelling via warfare and in search of to maneuver previous it.

Rasha Omar

Rasha Omar
In That Nook, 2024
Oil, acrylic and charcoal on canvas
170×140 cm

Rasha Omar
A Lullaby, 2024
Oil, Acrylic and charcoal on canvas
170 x 140 cm

Rasha Omar
Serenity, 2024
Oil, Acrylic and charcoal on canvas
170 x 140 cm

Rasha Omar
Purity, 2024
Oil, acrylic and charcoal on canvas
120 x 100 cm

Within the current time, amidst a tense world crammed with pressures, conflicts, and wars, we discover ourselves on an limitless journey in direction of reaching inside peace and tranquility. This journey, which can stem from the intuition for self-preservation and inner defensive reactions, grants us psychological stability and the power to proceed dwelling. I’ve lived via warfare and displacement, and these troublesome experiences have been milestones in my journey in direction of a deep understanding of inside peace. I started to appreciate that “paradise” is a spot that doesn’t exist; quite, it’s an inner state we should attempt diligently to attain inside ourselves. Subsequently, via my portray, I search to create imaginary worlds that characterize splendid havens of perfection and categorical reflections and contemplations on conflicts. This imaginative and prescient is manifested in my works via an intense visible language, providing splendid options to the issue of evil and its penalties. I imagine this may function a bridge to a state of peace and serenity.

Meriem Bennani

Meriem Bennani
Life on the CAPS, 2018–22
Single-channel video
76 minutes

Occasion on the CAPS, 2018; Guided Tour of a Spill, 2021; Life on the CAPS, 2022

Meriam Bennani makes use of digital media and docu-fiction to discover themes of displacement, biotechnology, and digital tradition via this speculative, three-part undertaking. Life on the CAPS facilities on Capsule (CAPS), a fictional island within the Atlantic Ocean that initially served as an internment camp for folks caught crossing worldwide borders. Over time, the island’s captive inhabitants has developed right into a thriving metropolis the place teleportation and changeable our bodies are frequent, and diasporic traditions turn out to be types of resistance. Developed through the current pandemic, the CAPS movie trilogy extends Bennani’s work on digital representations of up to date life. With family and friends enjoying variations of themselves, Bennani creates a digital distance to look at alienation, nervousness, and oppression brought on by geopolitical powers, bodily limitations, and world media. The Life on the CAPS trilogy presents a contemporary allegory of the world, presenting alternative routes of navigating fixed states of transition.

I’m involved in archetypes of human conduct and ritual alongside the visible traits of up to date digital media, testing the boundaries of what we regard as acquainted or international, actual or digital. A number of my work is motivated by the will to grasp my curiosity in these topic issues with sincerity. I attempt to deal with the politics that I really feel, those I’ve a visceral, real and unresolved dedication within the hope to transcend the restrictions of representational aesthetics. I often can’t make clear why a topic is attention-grabbing to me at first, so then that effort to articulate an curiosity with as a lot precision as potential turns into the work itself. In that effort to grasp and articulate ideas round a topic that generally feels too advanced or layered to summarize, I attempt to give you new photographs, a brand new language that emerges from the complexity itself, one that doesn’t depend on one particular style or medium however quite on the collaboration of all. I’m from Morocco, a spot the place the dialect itself is a mixture of classical Arabic, Berber, French, Spanish. These fixed linguistic and cultural clashes have formed my work very deeply. Expertise exists very organically in my work. Fairly than a instrument coming later into the method, it’s the medium I write the work in. I think about that After Results, Premiere and Cinema 4D are my mediums. Footage is uncooked materials that I run via these packages and from this forwards and backwards emerges a narrative manufactured on the pc. I typically present my movies in multi- channel installations utilizing projection mapping. Projection mapping permits me to edit in area and interact the physique. All these components serve the storytelling: I’m involved in reaching folks via their emotional intelligence and sense of humour. These are timeless methods that know-how is permitting me to discover in private and new methods.

Curated by
Benedikt Wyss and Samuel Leuenberger

at City SALTS, Basel
till September 1, 2024