[COMPUTER MOUSE CLICKING]
["New York Close Up"]
[SNEEZES]
I feel like I have a hard time connecting to
anything that doesn’t have humor
because for me, humor is like survival.
I can't imagine a state of no humor.
[Meriem Bennani's Exploded Visions]
I grew up in Rabat, Morocco
and I've lived in New York for nine years.
I had my first museum exhibition at PS1 last summer.
I couldn’t believe it, and I tried to stay cool.
But I was so excited.
I had about a month and a half to prepare.
I had tickets to go to Morocco the next week.
And I just decided I would observe and film everything
and kind of have this almost diaristic archive
of my two weeks there.
I wanted to take on this challenge
of using it in a way that I had never seen.
[MUSIC BEGINS PLAYING]
[FLY SINGS RIHANNA'S "KISS IT BETTER"] ♪ Kiss it, kiss it better, baby ♪
I made a 3-D fly in the video.
And so she's taking you on this tour.
She's kind of like the storyteller.
One characteristic of the fly is
that compound vision just formally felt like
a direct analogy with the room that had, like, twelve channels
and all these different points of views of video.
Video for me is new.
What I've always done is drawing.
I like that, with a video,
within one second, you know where you are.
I use footage as material,
and not for its real content,
but really using it as material
in the direction that is completely disconnected with its reality.
So I started making these little videos
where I would see something and then imagine what could be added
or removed or manipulated.
It would be really quick, like a fifteen-second video--
which was the time on Instagram before it became a minute--
and there was a freedom that was really fun in that.
[MUSIC BEGINS PLAYING]
This past spring, I was commissioned by Art Dubai
to make an installation.
And so I made these four sculptures
that were actually viewing stations.
They reference design in a way that makes you want to sit in them--
like, they feel comfortable,
but then you kind of are tricked because when you sit in them
your head ends up inside with a video that you are viewing.
[WOMAN] Action
--There is this Egyptian couple and the guy says:
--"Have you seen the stars habibi?"
--And the girl: "Oh habibi I have seen them indeed!"
[Isn't the Residence beautiful?]
[Me?]
[BENNANI] When I go to Morocco,
I am surrounded by these women that are powerful or very charismatic.
I filmed four women that are family members.
But, at the same time, they're always in between
being a family member and becoming a character.
[WOMAN SPEAKING IN FRENCH] --I work as a medical representative.
--I am divorced, no kids.
[BENNANI] There's these two extremes, you know.
On one side, I almost feel emotionally like a monster
who traps family members into this digital world.
And then the other extreme is like
[CAMERA CLICKS]
fully loving and celebrating family.
I feel like they're both necessary
and between the friction of both of them
is created all this potential for storytelling.
If you think that the time spent on a piece
is a hundred hours,
I spent maybe one hour with them
and ninety-nine hours editing--
looking at their face and tracking it frame by frame.
They have no idea that I'm spending so much time with them
while I'm in New York.
I like that.
I was invited by Public Art Fund,
and I made a video piece for the Barclays Center oculus screen.
The media portrays very extreme,
one-dimensional portraits of Muslims.
Because I knew this video would exist in a public space,
I felt the necessity to be more thoughtful
and reflect on women who wear the hijab.
The video was called "Your Year"
and it was showing a timeline of secular and Muslim holidays in America.
I wanted it to be not jokey,
but to be obviously in support of
women wearing the hijab in the neighborhood where they would see the video.
I had a different approach,
which was to actually do way more research,
to talk to women who wear the hijab--
who think about it, who write about it--
in today's America.
Being in New York--
with Trump, after this election--
is actually affecting me in deep ways.
Growing up in Morocco, I never really thought of myself,
for example, as an Arab.
Although I am, you know?
I never thought in those terms.
And being here,
with the travel ban uniting seven countries into this shitty situation,
for the first time I have felt it.
I don’t want to be a Moroccan or a Muslim woman artist.
I just want to be an artist
who is making a project about trees.
--Can I touch her?
--She's friendly?
--She doesn't bite?
What this political climate does
is that it asks you to think about your identity constantly.
And I feel like my reaction to that
has been to make work that
itself doesn’t stick to a genre or one identity.
It has to do with me not wanting to
define myself into one thing.