Meriem Bennani’s 2017 film Ghariba, an Arabic word meaning ‘stranger’ or ‘something strange’, opens with a shot of the face of a woman, Bouchra, in a spinning clock. Bennani brought this image to life for this limited edition benefiting The Renaissance Society. The video is a portrait of women in Bennani’s family, the main cast members from her personal childhood mythology. With a distance provided by a camera, Bennani and the women discuss middle-age, romance and sexuality, including the titular Bouchra sharing her first experience on Tinder.

Meriem Bennani (b. 1988, Morocco) works with video, sculpture, multimedia installation, and drawing, humorously interlacing globalized popular culture with the vernacular and traditional representation of Moroccan culture and history. Her work questions fractured identities in contemporary society, upheaving gendered histories through the filter of digital technologies. She had a solo exhibition at The Renaissance Society in 2022, which was a co-commission with Nottingham Contemporary. The Highline featured her first public sculpture commission, Windy, from 2022 to 2023.

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