For more than a decade, Meriem Bennani’s work has circulated through some of the most powerful institutions in the contemporary art world— the Whitney, MoMA PS1, Fondazione Prada, Fondation Louis Vuitton. Her films and installations have been written into the global conversation around digital culture, diaspora, borders, and surveillance. Her animated worlds are instantly recognizable: hyper-saturated, cartoonish, funny, unsettling. And yet, until now, they have never been shown in the country that shaped her imagination, her sense of humor, her rhythm. Until now, that is. Getting underway on December 13, 2025 and running through February 8, 2026, Bennani will present Life on the CAPS Trilogy in Essaouira, marking her first exhibition in Morocco.
Bennani grew up in Rabat in the 1990s, in an environment that was unusually nurturing of creative curiosity. Art was never framed as an indulgence or a detour, but was simply something she did. She painted constantly as a child, absorbing the idea that making images was a way of thinking rather than a special occasion. But if her earliest visual education came from anywhere, it came from screens. Cartoon Network characters, exaggerated gestures, looping storylines, and the surreal logic of animation shaped how she learned to look. Growing up in the 90s meant being raised by cartoons that didn’t explain themselves, worlds where elasticity, absurdity, and emotional excess were not flaws but narrative tools. Humor, for Bennani, never became a shield or a form of rebellion but a way of observing.
That attentiveness deepened with the internet. Before institutions, before global exhibitions, there was Moroccan YouTube—grainy, improvised, wildly inventive. Online spaces where content circulated freely, without polish or permission. Bennani has often pointed to this early digital culture as formative, not just aesthetically but structurally. It taught her that storytelling didn’t need validation to exist, that you could work fast, share widely, and let meaning emerge through circulation. That logic still animates her practice today. Even when her work enters museums, it moves with the density and velocity of the internet—layered, restless, allergic to dead air. She is acutely aware of attention as a material, almost anxious about losing it, and that anxiety becomes productive: rapid cuts, animated overlays, animal narrators, sound effects that feel lifted from phone videos or daytime TV.
That sensibility comes fully into focus in Life on the CAPS Trilogy, the body of work the artist is now bringing to Morocco for the first time. Developed between 2018 and 2022, CAPS unfolds on a fictional island floating in the mid-Atlantic, a holding zone where migrants intercepted mid-teleport are detained after teleportation replaces air travel. What begins as a site of surveillance slowly becomes a society of its own, complete with rituals, hierarchies, humor, and resistance movements. The trilogy—Party on the CAPS, Guided Tour of a Spill, and Life on the CAPS—moves constantly between scales, from intimate conversations to systemic control, from personal longing to collective choreography. Serious themes—displacement, borders, surveillance—are rendered approachable not by simplification, but by tone. Bennani borrows from reality TV, soap operas, music videos, and phone-camera aesthetics, formats she grew up consuming across generations, often without fully understanding the language yet intuitively grasping the drama. In CAPS, politics aren’t abstract. They’re felt—in awkward silences, in jokes that land too hard, in bodies waiting.
Bringing this work home was always something she wanted, but timing mattered. When NG, an art advisory and exhibitions company founded by Samy Ghiyati and Nicolas Nahab, invited her to show in Morocco, the alignment finally felt right.
Life on the CAPS Trilogy will be presented in Essaouira at Salle de Boxe in Port Entry Av. Mohammed V, a boxing gym dating back to the 1920s, a space deeply embedded in the city’s social fabric. Historically, the Salle de Boxe has functioned as more than a training ground. It is part of Essaouira’s port-era architecture, a civic structure tied to physical discipline, collective endurance, and everyday ritual. Generations have passed through it not as spectators but as participants, shaping their bodies within its walls. For Bennani, this context was essential.
The exhibition does not take over the venue. The gym will continue to operate as a gym. People will still train there, move through it, inhabit it as they always have. This decision was deliberate. Bennani is deeply wary of how elitist art spaces can feel, how easily they signal exclusion before a viewer even encounters the work. Here, the exhibition builds itself around a living space rather than suspending it. CAPS does not displace what already exists; it coexists with it. In a city shaped by trade, movement, and layered histories, that coexistence becomes part of the meaning.
Emotionally, the difference between this exhibition and showing at institutions like the Whitney or MoMA PS1 is profound. Those are spaces designed exclusively for art, sealed environments where attention is assumed and protected. Salle de Boxe is not that. It required Bennani to adapt, and to think about how her work lives alongside non-art activity, how it breathes in a space that has its own rhythms and users. And then there is the intimacy of place. CAPS was made with Morocco in mind—its languages, its humor, its contradictions—but showing it there removes the distance that often cushions reception abroad. There is no translation outward, no explanatory buffer. The work returns to a context that recognizes its references instinctively.
This is not a homecoming in the sentimental sense. Bennani never left Morocco behind in her work. It has always been present—in her mother and aunt’s performances, in Darija-inflected timing, in her refusal to exoticize or simplify.
For audiences encountering Bennani’s work locally for the first time, CAPS may feel funny, strange, or uncomfortably familiar. That tension is intentional. Her work does not offer solutions or clarity. It offers recognition. It sits with complexity rather than resolving it. And perhaps that is why this exhibition matters—not because it marks a milestone, but because it resists the idea that milestones are endpoints. In Salle de Boxe, amid the sounds of training and movement, Bennani’s fictional island doesn’t feel distant at all.
