Myriam El Haïk (1973, Rabat, Morocco) is a Moroccan-French artist, composer and performer. Her artistic language is based on simple signs, patterns, or actions. The links between music and visual art take center stage in her work. She develops systems of visual notations, transposing her repetitive and minimalist musical compositions into drawings, performances, videos, installations, sculptures, and even furniture and games.
Across all her different mediums, El Haïk plays a never-ending game with and within the limits set by the rules she invents - be it the rules of her musical compositions, her systems of notation, her minimalist abstract visual vocabulary, or back to her starting point, the rules of writing. In her peculiar way, she is pushing and pursuing her inventions across the borders of the various mediums she uses. She plays with colors, patterns, lines, structures, and ultimately with the notion of time, which is central in all her work. Over her career, a body of work has unfolded that is as versatile and complex as it is minimalist and coherent.
El Haïk lives and works in Berlin, Paris and Rabat. Her visual art has been exhibited in numerous solo and group shows in galleries and contemporary art centers in Europe and Morocco (Paris, Berlin, Mantova, Bratislava, Marseille, Rabat, Marrakech, Tangier). Her performances were presented in the context of inted festivals (Paris, London, Montreal, New York). Since 2018, El Haïk has been particularly active in Berlin, and in 2022, KW Institute for Contemporary Art invited her to participate in the 12th Berlin Biennale.