MERIEM BENNANI

The video artist, who is based in New York, became an Instagram sensation last year with her animated lockdown chronicles featuring two lizards.

Born in 1988, Moroccan artist Meriem Bennani first studied at ENSAD in Paris before attending Cooper Union, in New York, where she now lives. Few are those who have put so much energy and humour into video art, which she uses to create giant installations that occupy space in a very particular way. With respect to content, Bennani is not afraid to tackle all the complexity of political and social problems, be it migration, the role of women in society or the disastrous handling of the pandemic by Donald Trump, and uses footage found on YouTube to help her in her task. During lockdown last year, Bennani teamed up with the director Orian Barki to produce the Instagram sensation 2 Lizards. Over the course of eight episodes, this animated miniseries followed the two reptiles as they wandered around a Brooklyn emptied of its inhabitants, their conversations drawn from the health bulletins broadcast by Dr Anthony Fauci (the immunologist advising the US government, who often came to blows with Trump), news streams and discussions with their friends.

Broadcast on @meriembennani, the videos humorously reflected the daily lockdown lives of millions around the globe, who identified en masse with the main characters. Now that the series has ended, Bennani is working on her next exhibition, to be shown at the François Ghebaly gallery in Los Angeles.

NUMÉRO: What’s your background? How much did the context you were raised in influence you?

MERIEM BENNANI: I grew up in Rabat, and went to art school in Paris then New York, where I’ve been living for the past 12 years. These three places influenced me as much as anyone is impacted by their surroundings in a historical and banal way at the same time.

Do you remember your first encounter with art? What made you want to become an artist?

There wasn’t a specific, memorable, revelatory first time. My parents always liked art, so I was lucky to grow up around it. It was mostly modern painting and drawing or 1970s and 80s Moroccan artists. Probably my most influential early encounter with art, without my knowing it, was when we got pirated access to Cartoon Network at home.

What were you looking at then and what are you looking at today?

I looked at a lot of art books that we had at home, and art magazines from France as a teenager. I was very into drawings, very classic stuff like Picasso and Matisse, David Hockney. I was mostly listening to a lot of music, which I think has really influenced the work I make today. Trip-hop was big at the time. Today what I look at with the most attention is film and TV, as well as music videos on YouTube.

How has the pandemic affected your production?

I was relieved to see shows being postponed and to have more time to really work without bureaucracy and an imposed schedule. I am now preparing a show that is structured around a video piece that had to be entirely crafted around the impossibility of travelling and filming. So I’m doing a lot of animation, and I asked this person I wanted to shoot in Morocco to film himself instead. I think having to reassess the way I work is good – it shakes things up.

How important is the studio to you? Do you have a daily practice or routine? How do you organize the way you work?

I don’t have a studio, which I like because it makes me feel freer and lighter. I also love cooking and taking naps, so I prefer being in a place that feels cosy. I do think it could be healthy to get a studio at some point, to separate work from home and to do more physical things away from the screen, like drawing. I’ve gotten much better at having set work hours and taking weekends off recently. I no longer think it’s cool to be constantly working.

Do you always finish a video before starting a new one? Do you work in series or is each work individual?

I think I’ve made all my videos one after the other. Some work as individual pieces and others as part of series, like my project Life on the CAPS, which comprises multiple chapters. But even individual projects exist in different forms, because they include video, sculpture or installation, so the lines are blurry.

Do you always know what you will direct, or can it be spontaneous?

The instinct to go towards a subject is spontaneous and intuitive, but then making the work – shooting and editing the video, planning the installation – is how I go through the process of clarifying that instinct and understanding it, questioning it, which is more methodical.

What were the sources for the content of your Instagram videos?

The 2 Lizards videos started spontaneously during the first week of lockdown when, just for fun, Orian Barki and I decided to animate 3D cartoon characters having an existential conversation. I showed her a folder of 3D animals ready to be animated and she chose the lizard. We animated a video with two lizards based on a conversation we’d recorded of ourselves. It was received with a lot of enthusiasm and, most importantly, we had so much fun doing it, so we kept going, trying to capture the mood of each week, witnessing the pandemic unfolding in New York before our eyes through these slow and shiny reptiles.

Do you give titles to your works?

My works all have titles, but I don’t think I’m much good at coming up with them. The titles are functional, not in the least decorative and not really conceptual either.

Can you talk a little bit about your working technique?

I’ll use anything available to me in order to hit the exact emotion I am trying to communicate. I often choose subjects that are not easy to resolve – I’m interested in capturing the contradictions and complexities of the politics of trivial events. I try to maintain tension throughout a timebased piece in order to be as true towards an idea as I can be, and I use non-fiction methods, storytelling, editing, animation programmes, architecture and sound to get there.

How do you install your pieces? Is the architecture of an exhibition space important to you? Do you care about the display or do you prefer the computer screen?

Display and architecture are super-important to me. Each time I install a piece I redesign it to work with the architecture it will be going in. The video is being edited while the installation is being drawn. It’s all made at the same time because it’s all part of the same piece, the video channels and the screens they will be projected on. If I’m lucky enough to be trusted with an existing space to show my work, it’s important for me to create an embodied and generous experience.

Do you feel associated with a community or a movement?

Not really. But I understand the ways in which I am part of a specific time and generation and how that affects my work.

Is there anything that you’d like to make people conscious of through your art?

I never want to be didactic or have any kind of ambition of authority through my work. It just doesn’t fit with my personality or how I like to interact with people. I care more about opening things up, raising questions and doing all of that with a lot of heart.

What’s your next project?

I’m currently finishing pieces for a new show that will be opening on 6 March at the François Ghebaly gallery in Los Angeles.