24.12.1963–present
Amina Benbouchta
Amina Benbouchta (born 1963 in Casablanca) came to art from anthropology: in 1986 she graduated from McGill University in Montreal, then spent two years auditing classes at the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris. She works in painting, photography and installation, and showed at the Cairo Biennial in 1993 and in Washington. In the 1990s she headed a fashion and culture magazine and belonged to Collectif 212.
Biography
Her artistic career is usually dated from 1986, the year she graduated from McGill University in Montreal. Her degree was not in art: she majored in anthropology and Middle Eastern Studies.
Amina Benbouchta was born on 24 December 1963 in Casablanca. Her childhood and youth fell in the Years of Lead, the reign of King Hassan II, a period marked by state violence and political intolerance. She left Morocco to study in Canada. By her own account, while living abroad in the 1980s she realised that art was not confined to painting and sculpture. In 1988 she came to Paris and for two years attended classes at the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts as an auditor. In the 1990s she headed a fashion and culture magazine whose title is spelled in two ways: Les Alignés or Les Aligés. In the same years she became one of the founders of Collectif 212, a group of artists and curators who set out to support emerging contemporary artists in Morocco. Its members included Hassan Echair, Safâa Erruas, Jamila Lamrani, Imad Mansour, Myriam Mihindou and Younés Rahmoun. According to some accounts, in 2007 she also joined the art association La source du lion in Casablanca.
Her work was shown at the Cairo Biennial in 1993 and at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC, in 1997. Her most recent group and solo exhibitions have taken place in Rabat. She shows most often in Morocco, Spain and France, and began attending art fairs in 2008, starting with Marrakech.
Three residencies are recorded by year. In 1997 she worked at a children’s hospital in Rabat, in 2004 at the Musée de Marrakech as part of the project Maroc-France, expériences croisées, and in 2008 at the Castell de Dénia in Spain.
In her paintings, installations and photography Benbouchta draws on her training in anthropology. She turns to everyday objects, to the human figure and to the cultural environment in which she grew up, and makes gender politics and other social issues her main subject. It is these themes that have brought her work international recognition.
Profile notes