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Meriem Bennani
Windy
On the High Line at 24th Street
Merging magical realism, absurdist humor, and techniques from a wide range of moving image genres, Meriem Bennani creates video series that tell stories about human behavior and our experiences on- and offline, tackling subjects such as language, displacement, and diasporic living. Employing production aesthetics and storytelling methods found in recognizable forms such as reality television, home videos, documentary film, cell phone videos, and animation, Bennani welcomes the viewer into narratives that feel like an amplification of reality. Bennani shares her videos in a variety of traditional and creative formats, from immersive projection installations, to screens embedded in colorful, cartoon-like sculptures, to social media platforms like Instagram.
On the High Line, Bennani realizes her first public sculpture, Windy, co-commissioned by High Line Art and Audemars Piguet Contemporary. Windy is a spinning sculpture in the shape of a tornado made from black foam. The work plays with various traditions and ambiguities of public sculpture. In many cases, the public is asked to walk around public sculpture, taking in its grandeur from a safe distance. Bennani’s sculpture spins itself, and at a speed that makes the details of the work almost impossible to grasp—both visually and physically. The work continues Bennani’s practice of creating large, geometric steel sculptures, which to date she has built to house her videos. Windy marks Bennani’s first sculpture that exists on its own terms, while the object’s movement continues her fascination with animation and the way that drawn and still characters come to life. In her conceptualization of the work, Bennani was inspired by the dynamism and constant movement on the High Line, wishing to make a sculpture that could capture and work within this urban energy.
About Audemars Piguet Contemporary
Audemars Piguet Contemporary, established in 2012, commissions international artists to create contemporary artworks. The art programme of Audemars Piguet—the oldest fine watchmaking manufacturer still in the hands of its founding families—engages with and commissions artists to create new work across a variety of scales and media, which may enable them to explore new territories in their practice. The curatorial team accompanies each commission process from inception to development to exhibition and builds experiences for audiences to engage with the work around the world. The resulting artworks belong to the artists and contribute to their body of work. Learn more.
Artist bio
Meriem Bennani (b. 1988, Rabat, Morocco) is an artist based in New York. She has presented solo exhibitions at the Renaissance Society, Chicago, Illinois (2022); Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham, England (2022); Julia Stoschek Collection, Berlin, Germany (2020); Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, France (2019); The Kitchen, New York, New York (2017); and MoMA PS1, Long Island City, New York (2016). Her work has been featured in group exhibitions at institutions including LAX, Los Angeles, California (2020); Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, Denmark (2020); and MAXXI National Museum of XXI Arts, Rome, Italy (2018). She has participated in major international exhibitions including the Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York (2019); Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement, Turin, Italy (2019); Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva, Switzerland (2018); Biennale de Rennes, France (2018); and 11th Shanghai Biennale, China (2016).
