About the artist

Soukaina Joual is a Moroccan multi-disciplinary artist born in 1990, graduated from the National Institute of Fine Arts in Tetouan, Morocco in 2011. Her various works showcase an interest in how one’s body can translate and reflect various tensions, dynamics and differences. She usually focuses on the body from different perspectives: how it changes, its’ interaction with personal identity, and how it can also become a site to engage in important ideological debates.

Most of the artist’s projects translate her commitment to various forms of presence, and how she trades various shifts between visibility and invisibility, belonging and absence. Joual uses the body as an object of myth, as a stand-in or a metaphor for society, to bring together the body as historical form with a modernist perspective. She simultaneously blurs the lines between different dualities: public and private space, the individual and the community, the inside and the outside of our bodies; by elaborating proposals which tackle the limits between an artistic intervention and an everyday civic action.

Throughout her practice, she intends to examine social issues of race, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity. Her work interrogates how the body is psychically, socially, sexually and representationally produced. How the bodies can find their place in the chaos of individual desires, political constraints and social conventions and how to create universal and personal images of the body.

Joual participated in various projects in institutions and spaces in Morocco (L’appartement 22, Le Cube Independent Art room, Le 18 Marrakesh, GVCC), in Germany (Halle 14, The 5th New Talents Biennale Cologne), in France (Friche de la Belle de Mai, Cité internationale des Arts de Paris), in Japan (Sunday Issue Gallery, Ken Nakahashi Galery, Block House, Space Jikka), in Egypt (MASS Alexandria), in South Korea (Seoul Art Space GEUMCHEON).

Joual's performance "I am not so innocent anymore"

“I’m not So Innocent Anymore” is a fourty minute long performance that took place during the New Talent Biennial in Cologne in 2016. The performance is inspired by the imagery of butcher’s shops, the beauty of hanging meat, the color, smell and texture of flesh. The aesthetics of meat also recalls the horror and violence of life; in its duality between the morbid and the political, yet intriguing.

The representation of raw meat, carrying it, cutting it and grinding it, is addressing a brief reflection on war’s both aesthetic and disturbing aspects. Through this act of protesting, the artist is reflecting on political and social images of the Arab Spring.