La Bête
A Modern Tale
In 2012, Benabderrahmane returned to her home country of Morocco after 12 years, crossing the dunes and plains to create Super-8 films mapping out the ever-changing landscape. The film stills collected in this book invite us to follow the path winding between tradition and modernity. We travel to the Bouregreg Valley, a new cultural centre which symbolizes the modernity and changing physiognomy of ancestral lands. Further afield, we discover the desert plains of Chichaoua, rocky and stripped back, where sleepy villages nestle in a place where time stands still.
From these familiar spaces and bodies, in which the history of contemporary Morocco is played out with all its contradictions, Benabderrahmane invites us to experience a sensitive, mineral and instinctive Moroccan history, where stones tumble, blood clots and where the artist’s gaze comes to a place at once familiar and ever-changing.
Published by MACK, January 2020
Exhibition at Le Bal from 13 January until 12 April 2020
Yasmina Benabderrahmane
"I come from a part of a Muslim family practicing: the representation of the body is seen as a sacrilege. On the other hand I am the daughter of a hairdresser and I grew up in a beauty institute. However, the relationship with the body has always been a taboo in my family. This dichotomy between the modest body in the intimate sphere and the public body is for me a source of astonishment and fascination. I aspire to show what one does not see and to divert what one sees. - Yasmina Benabderrahmane
Yasmina Benabderrahmane was born in 1983 in Rueil-Malmaison. She graduated from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 2009 and from the Le Fresnoy National Contemporary Art Studio in 2015. Her work has been the subject of several collective exhibitions, notably at the 54th Contemporary Art Fair of Paris, city of Montrouge in 2009, or the exhibition Jeune Création in 2013 at CENTQUATRE. In 2019 she was named the winner of the ADAGP Prize LE BAL of Young Creation, intended for photographers and / or videographers under 40 residing in Europe. It is intended to accompany the winner for two years in the realization of a project of creation already begun. Her final project, 'A bras le corps' will be exhibited at Le Bal in January 2020 and published by MACK books under the title 'La Bête A Modern Tale'.
