Meryam Benbachir
Residency at Glasgow Sculpture Studios (GB-SCT), as part of a cross-residency program.
An artist, writer and performer based between Marseille and Paris, Meryam Benbachir (1999) develops a practice at the intersection of writing, performance, installation and critical research. Having graduated with a DNSEP from MO.CO. ESBA in 2024, she conducts long-term research into regimes of visibility, marginalised narratives and strategies of opacity as forms of resistance.
Her practice examines the ways in which diasporic, queer and racialised bodies are rendered legible, conditioned or instrumentalised within cultural spaces. Through silence, erasure, withdrawal or fragmentation, she constructs forms that subvert expectations of representation and shift regimes of identification. Moving between Arabic, French, Kabyle, English and silence, her work conceives of language as a wounded, shifting and organic material.
Her installations explore transparency, disappearance and the thresholds of perception, whilst her performances utilise the voice as a sensory archive and a space of survival. In parallel, she conducts research into symbolic currencies, identity capitalisation and affective economies within the field of contemporary art.
Her work has been exhibited at venues including the Institut des Cultures d’Islam, La Villette, Carreau du Temple, Couvent de la Belle de Mai and Thundercage.
Meryam Benbachir often wonders how much a token is worth. What’s fascinating is that its value is constantly changing, depending on who holds it, as well as when and where one is.
Since 1999, she has gained the added value of a degree and incurred a deficit of 4–5 tokens.
Unless the economic regime of visibility changes radically and this deficit turns into added value?
Bankruptcy, writing, and installation are her main solutions.
She is currently trying to create a Chamber of Commerce of Tokenism, questioning symbolic values within contemporary visual art practices.