Hicham Benohoud
After teaching visual arts for 13 years in Marrakech, Hicham Benohoud leaves Morocco to live in Paris, though still often traveling back to his homeland. As a man of contrasts and doubts, he wants to show that new visions only arise when fixed patterns are broken. Benohoud thus ardently combats the religious dogmas in his country. “Somehow I feel that the place where my work fits is in the struggle", he says. The oeuvre of Benohoud is rooted in Moroccan culture, family, religion and hierarchical structures. From a somewhat detached position vis-à-vis his culture, Islamic traditions, power and society, the artist constantly inquires into matters of identity, both individual and collective. In his ‘staged’ photographs, people are transformed into objects, bodies into attributes. That which we find familiar, he de-humanizes. His surrealist, enigmatic images always play the same game of hide and reveal, embellish and disfigure, humanize and alienate.