MACAAL Webinar I
Rebecca Anne Proctor in conversation with Amina Benbouchta
April 30, 2020 – 4 pm (Morocco)
Language: English
In the context of our MACAAL Friends At Home series, we were pleased to invite Former Editor-in-Chief of Harper’s Bazaar Art and Harper’s Bazaar Interiors Rebecca Anne Proctor and multidisciplinary artist Amina Benbouchta to our first Zoom webinar.
They both discussed Benbouchta’s practice as well as the work Éternel retour du désir amoureux (Eternal Return of Desire), 2019, currently featured at MACAAL’s ongoing exhibition HAVE YOU SEEN A HORIZON LATELY? curated by Marie-Ann Yemsi.
About Rebecca Anne Proctor
Rebecca Anne Proctor is the former Editor-in-Chief of Harper’s Bazaar Art and Harper’s Bazaar Interiors, a role she held since January 2015. Her writing has been published in The New York Times Style Magazine; Bloomberg Businessweek, Canvas, Artnet News, Wallpaper, Frieze, BBC, Arab News, Galerie, FOLIO, The National, ArtNews and The Business of Fashion. She has also well as written several texts for books and catalogues on Middle Eastern art and culture. Rebecca obtained her M. Litt from Christie’s London in Modern and Contemporary Art History after which she worked at Gagosian Gallery before moving to Paris to pursue a double MA in Middle Eastern Studies and Conflict Resolution from the American University of Paris and a Master’s in Sociologie des Conflits (Sociology of Conflicts) from the L’Institut Catholique. She is a highly in-demand speaker and moderator at cultural and art events throughout the Middle East, Europe and the US where Rebecca argues that art and culture are means to bring about cross-cultural dialogue and socio-economic change.
About Amina Benbouchta
The polymorphic work of Amina Benbouchta is deeply poetic, cultivating the malice and trouble of Alice in Wonderland to explore intimate and collective memory, and to question the place and future of women in contemporary society in general, and Morocco in particular. Combining drawing, painting, sculpture, installation and photography, her work – rich in symbolism and metaphor – attracts and seduces the spectator with refined and elegant forms where doubt lingers, and tension is pervasive. The artist draws from personal experience and observation of her environment to reveal silences, words not spoken, violence hidden beneath the glazed surfaces of domestic household objects, redolent with scent of menace and beauty.
Since the 1990s, her multidisciplinary body of work has often been shown in international institutions and events: Cairo Biennale (1993), Casa Árabe de Madrid (2008), Alexandria Biennale (2009). In 2014, Piège à loup was featured in the inaugural exhibition of the Musée Mohamed VI d’art moderne et contemporain in Rabat. In 2016, the artiste presented Traversées – A Work in Progress, the result of a long-term residency at Dar El Kitab in Casablanca. For the first edition of the Rabat Biennale in 2019, she created the installation Éternel Retour du désir amoureux.
