Meriem Bennani: Redefining digital art with humour, social commentary, and the uncanny

Moroccan-born Meriem Bennani is one of the most compelling digital artists of her generation, deploying humour, social commentary, and the uncanny in her pieces. An artist and filmmaker based in New York, Bennani constructs playful and incisive worlds that push the boundaries of what digital art can be and what stories it can tell. Her work—spanning film, sculpture, and intricate installations—boldly reimagines storytelling as a fluid, multi-platform experience that teases the line between the real and the fantastical. She moves deftly between formats, from documentary, to animation, to simple phone footage, building surreal pieces that speak to the fractured, interconnected nature of modern existence. 

Bennani’s pieces are distinct in that they flourish in the digital world, rather than as an adaptive afterthought for the realm. Her fascination with the language of media—reality TV, YouTube, and tropes of science fiction—underscores a wider interest with how identity and meaning morph in a digital society. Her initial inspiration? “A perfect cocktail of watching Cartoon Network and observing the fabulous women in my family,” Bennani tells Dazed MENA. 

Her recently opened solo exhibition, ‘For My Best Family,’ commissioned by Fondazione Prada, is an elaborate two-story installation. Each layer of the piece is tailored to conjure a complex ecosystem of sound, movement, and communal space. In one room, flip-flops, meticulously arranged and animated, interact with one-another through a pneumatic system, creating what she has described as a ‘ballet-symphony-riot.’ These objects—playful and haunting in orchestration—evoke collective rituals, reminiscent of Daqqa Marrakchia in Morocco, creating an atmosphere of catharsis. “I feel like my job is to create new images in order to try and push the limits of different socio-political imaginaries,” Bennani tells Dazed. 

Running until mid February 2025, the exhibition also accommodates a cinema-like area for the screening of ‘For Aicha,’ a new art film directed by Bennani herself along with Orian Barki. The film’s story stretches from Casablanca to New York, featuring anthropomorphic animals that trot along topographies of realism and autobiography. There’s a calculated whimsy to the film; in projecting human emotions and fraught family dynamics onto animated creatures, Bennani smuggles charged social issues into digestible, endearing forms. The film crafts a liminal space hosting fictional and real-life dialogues on identity, migration, and generational divides. 

Her work rises up from screens in humour and absurdity, bootlegging socio-political commentary through it all. Her piece ‘Mission Teens: French School in Morocco,’ a film presented in 2019 by Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, prodded contemporary society in Rabat, Bennani’s birthplace. A fictional documentary following teens in a French school in the city, the film interrogated issues surrounding cultural disparities, gender, and the pervasive force of technology. Her film ‘2 Lizards,’ which was shown at the Whitney and also co-directed by Barki, is a surrealist look at the early months of the pandemic in New York. “Making art and film has been the most fulfilling way to express myself and organise emotional reactions to different ideas,” Bennani professes. “I experience a lot of pleasure in feeling like I have found a way to express things with precision. There is something very rewarding in that process.”

Though she’s leading the way for digital creatives in the SWANA region, Bennani is in awe of the evolving media production scene. She speaks fervently about wanting to push the boundaries of what visual culture can communicate, especially as a wealth of dynamic digital subcultures begin to prosper.  “I feel like we’re witnessing the emergence of amazing music/YouTube/TikTok subgenres every other week and I’m learning so much from then,” Bennani observes. “I see things that feel extremely familiar elements of the culture while proposing never seen before ideas. Reality and sci-fi are constantly mixing. I think that’s the magic I’m trying to learn from: the perfect mix of familiar and unfamiliar in my approach to story, genre, and rhythm. My work is kind of a depiction of the fascination I just described.”

Bennani recognises that the digital realm and its platforms affords the global south opportunities to recentre their art, unfettered by Western models or constraints. “I hope that more infrastructures based on local industries’ needs—rather than imported—can emerge to support the different scenes [in South West Asia and North Africa] in sustainable and exciting ways,” the artist muses. “It’s cool to notice how the Chaabi and Rai music industries, for example, have their own internal system that is not exactly based on the Western music industry model. It’s probably far from perfect but there is maybe something to learn there for the future.”

Looking to the future, Bennani envisions a legacy that extends beyond her own incredible output. “I think it would be really cool to eventually achieve something outside of my own creative space,” Bennani remarks. “I’d love to use some of the things I learned to create a structure that can support young artists in Morocco. There are a few things I want to fully push before I can do that but it feels like everything is naturally leading there.”