BERLIN.- Meriem Bennani’s first solo exhibition in Germany presents Party on the CAPS (2018), an eight-channel video installation exploring displacement, resilience, and the relationship between identity and place. Conceived as a documentary set in a speculative future about daily life on CAPS, an island turned megacity in the middle of the Atlantic, where migrants are detained, the work amplifies reality through special effects and humor.
Bennani, a Moroccan artist based in New York, conceptualized CAPS in 2017 while researching subatomic teleportation and in response to Donald Trump’s US travel ban. The work offers an acute political commentary on Western immigration and surveillance policies, summoning a dystopian reality only slightly different from our own. In the work, Bennani also pays tribute to difference and hybridity by resisting essentialist notions of identity and culture, instead addressing the in-between and multiple states of life in the diaspora. As viewers we are witness to a celebration— or party—of collectivity and family.
In the future world in which the island of CAPS (short for capsule) exists, teleportation has replaced other forms of travel, enabling bodies to easily move from one place to another. CAPS was established as a temporary holding area for illegal migrants intercepted mid-teleportation on their way to the US. The island is surrounded by a magnetic field, guarded by US troops, and subject to total surveillance, making it almost impossible to leave. Bennani’s docunarrative begins two generations after the establishment of CAPS: cut off from the rest of the world, the island has developed its own internal logic, currency, infrastructure, traditions, cuisine, and media. CAPS is characterized by a mélange of hybrid cultures—growing out of the myriad identities of its inhabitants, their makeshift living situation, and the dominance of digital technologies—and is populated by cyborgian, often injured, bodies adapting to and coping with the island’s oppressive environment and the aftereffects of teleportation.
Party on the CAPS highlights Bennani’s playful and unique visual language inspired by reality TV, YouTube, documentary, social media, and animation, examining the boundaries of what we regard as familiar and strange, real and virtual. For the exhibition at
Julia Stoschek Collection, the screens and sculptural elements that make up Party on the CAPS have been adapted to the gallery space to create a large-scale and wholly immersive environment.
Meriem Bennani (b. 1988 in Rabat, Morocco, lives and works in Brooklyn, New York) graduated with a BFA from The Cooper Union in New York and an MFA from the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. Recent solo exhibitions by Bennani have been shown at Foundation Louis Vuitton, Paris (2019); The Kitchen, New York (2017); Art Dubai (2016); MoMA PS1, New York (2016); Signal Gallery, New York (2015); and Stream Gallery, New York (2015). Her work has also been shown internationally in group exhibitions including the Whitney Biennial, New York (2019); Biennale of Moving Images, Geneva (2018); Public Art Fund, New York (2017); Shanghai Biennale (2016); the Frank F. Yang Art & Education Foundation, Shenzhen (2016); Flax Fahrenheit, Los Angeles (2016); Jewish Museum, New York (2015); and MANA Contemporary, Chicago (2015). Bennani’s work is part of the collections of The Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; and Kadist Foundation, Paris.
