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Amina Benbouchta
(Framed Works)
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Amina Benbouchta (Moroccan)
Amina Benbouchta is a multidisciplinary artist, she goes from charcoal to photography, from canvas to colored glass, to reveal images of an uninterrupted initiatory journey, populated by everyday objects with a strong symbolic charge. She plays with our perceptions of power and desire. Among them are recurring elements that inhabit her pictorial lexicon with multiple levels of meaning: the crinoline is both a tool of seduction and an enslavement of the female body, the Babel tower of political violence.
The rabbit is present in her Arab cultural heritage through the tales of Kalila Wa Dimna and embodies the animal spirit in African mythology as a messenger of the invisible. She assumes a double cultural belonging and probes the social constructions of each: in the Western world, everything must be seen, in the Oriental culture things are veiled, they must be protected from the evil eye. Benbouchta offers a reflection on domination and human perception. She takes her personal socio-political context and transposes it to a universal level.
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Myriam El Haïk
(Framed Works)
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Myriam El Haïk (Moroccan)
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.
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Michael Dell
(Framed Works)
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Michael Dell (New Zealander)Michael Dell’s paintings and drawings shift between abstraction and representation. His works have been described as having an ambivalent everyday quality, equally unremarkable in lack of narrative and simplicity, as they are absorbing in stillness and otherness.
The single-image photograph has long been a source material for Dell and his paintings and drawings often mimic the analogue failures of film negatives and discarded film prints. His paintings, both abstract and landscapes, bear evident attention to the picture surface, creating a static tension between materiality, depth and subject.
Dell was born in Christchurch, New Zealand. He has exhibited solo shows widely within New Zealand and was selected for the touring group exhibition ‘Print and Paper’ that traveled to Kurashiki, Japan. In 2020, the Nelson public art museum The Suter Art Gallery held a solo exhibition of Dell’s recent paintings and drawings. His works are held in public art collections throughout New Zealand, including The Christchurch City Art Gallery, Waikato Museum of Art and History, The Suter Art Gallery, and in the Auckland University Art Collection. Dell is the recipient of several national art awards, most recently winning the 2019 Parkin Drawing Prize.
