NG produced Meriem Bennani’s first solo exhibition in her home country. Taking place in Essaouira, Morocco, for two months in the winter of 2025, the project was presented in a local boxing club and co-organized with the association that runs it.
The exhibition was developed in partnership with the Municipality of Essaouira and presented under the patronage of André Azoulay, Advisor to His Majesty King Mohammed VI.
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Life on the CAPS (2018–22) is a compelling film trilogy encompassing Party on the CAPS (2018–19), Guided Tour of a Spill (CAPS Interlude) (2021), and Life on the CAPS (2022).
The narrative unfolds on a fictional island floating in the mid‑Atlantic, known as the CAPS—short for “capsule.” In this imaginative dystopian world, teleportation has replaced traditional air travel. Migrants attempting illegal teleports are intercepted and detained on the island, eventually forming a makeshift society with its own vibrant hybrid culture, rituals, and resistance movements in opposition to the troops that patrol the CAPS.
Bennani’s playful aesthetic defies traditional genres, merging live-action footage, computer-generated animation, and stylistic elements from reality TV, music videos, documentary, and phone-camera aesthetics. Her videos on contemporary realities make serious themes much more approachable and compelling.
The trilogy deftly pivots between the intimate (personal stories) and the expansive (surveillance, diaspora), highlighting themes of displacement, identity, and the tension between individual experience and collective life.
Life on the CAPS has traveled internationally to the following venues : Renaissance Society (2022), Nottingham Contemporary (2022), The Power Plant (2022), Fondation Kamel Lazaar (2023), Art Gallery of New South Wales (2023). The series is part of renowned collections such as MoMA, the Guggenheim, Art Gallery of South Wales, Qatar Museums, Julia Stoschek Collection, Hartwig Art Foundation, the Vega Foundation.
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Meriem Bennani (b. 1988 in Rabat, Morocco) lives and works in New York. She has been developing a shape-shifting practice of films, sculptures and immersive installations, composed with a subtle agility to question contemporary society, its fractured systems, individual identity, and ubiquitous dominance of digital technologies. Meriem Bennani’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Fondazione Prada, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Fondation Louis Vuitton, MoMA PS1, among others.