VIDEO 2026
“There is no end
To what a living world
Will demand of you.”
— Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower (1993)
This selection of videos, inspired by the writings of author Octavia E. Butler, reflect on contemporary human conditions. The works by Neil Beloufa, Meriem Bennani, Mohamed Bourrouissa, Cecile B.Evans and David Noonan explore the enigma of what it means to be, at the crossroads of constraints, choices, systems, violence, and experiences that shape existences. How to situate oneself when the world is in flux? How to remain human in the face of inhumanity? As our era urges us to question the meaning of our presence, the works gathered here offer hypotheses about our capacity to act, imagine, produce and reinvent. These works are meditations on the structures that surround us, and the possibility of rethinking these frameworks. Conceived as an ode to the liberation of the imagination, this selection treats the unknown and the uncertain as fertile territories, precisely because they remain imaginable. These films propose a conversation about how we invent and inhabit our lives. Faithful to Lauren Olamina, the main character imagined by visionary Octavia E. Butler, they also call for cultivating empathy as a key to a desirable future.
Video 2026 is curated by Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel.
Cecile B. Evans
Reality or Not, 2023
HD Video
34 min and 53 sec
Reality or Not (2023) is a work about the production of realities, and what it takes to create new ones. What and who shapes reality, and to whom does it belong? In the film, multiple storylines traverse the shifting natures of agency, power, and authenticity. A narrator introduces a group of teenage girls, the “realitarians”, who, while participating in a reality show, seize control of the imposed scenario and attempt to invent a new way of existing. These characters confront notions such as debt, history, technology, and time — concepts that mold what is commonly accepted as “real.” To counter this system, the girls practise “shifting”: a visualisation technique that trains the mind to enter other universes, developed during Covid lockdowns and made popular on TikTok. Moving from one world to another and recognising the malleability of existence, the film questions how reality is shaped and transformed as values shift and the past and its legacy are revisited.
Cécile B. Evans’ (b. 1983) practice offers stirring accounts of the governance and rebellion of human emotions and behaviors, in particular as they come into contact with the ideological, physical, and technological structures that aspire to contain them.
The artist’s films, sculptures, tableaux and installations establish a dramaturgy around the dissonance, negotiation and solidarity between subjects as they interface with systems and hyper-objects that often present as unbreachable in scale and nature. Evans’ work embodies both their interrogative and imaginative approach to major themes and curious tributaries. To date, these have included psychogeographies, the inhabitability of the Internet, the industrial revolution, terrorism, dress codes, stem cell research, ideology disguised by architecture, love, live-audience television, reality television, microbial energy sources, ballet, and the immiseration of workers within a society that is motivated by a corporatised ‘good.’ Through these expansive narrative propositions, Evans explores this interface between humanity and the realities it produces.
Cécile B. Evans is represented by Château Shatto (Los Angeles).
Meriem Bennani
Cursed Objects, 2022
HD video (colour, sound)
5′ 2″
Edition of 3 plus 2 artist’s proofs (1/3)
Cursed Objects (2022) is a video populated by psychedelic characters, rendered in acidic colours and carried by intense operatic music mixed with singeli, a futuristic Tanzanian musical genre that can reach 300 beats per minute. The animation depicts a woman performing “Routini Lyawmi,” a controversial Moroccan cultural phenomenon in which moments of daily life are shared on social media, often with subtly erotic undertones. As the narrative unfolds, the objects belonging to the character — a Bialetti coffee maker, a paper straw, a flip-flop — come to life and attack her as the result of a 5G curse cast by an internet witch. Bennani also inserts elements recalling her childhood in Morocco, as well as memories of teleshopping channels and their fetishisation of banal objects. A hallucinatory vision, Cursed Objects honours the worlds that emerge within domestic and intimate spaces, along with the extraordinary identities that evolve there.
Meriem Bennani (born 1988 in Rabat, Marocco) lives and works in Brooklyn. She received her BFA from Cooper Union, New York in 2012, and her MFA from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, Paris in 2011. Last year, Meriem Bennani had a major solo exhibition at the Fondazione Prada in Milan.
Meriem Bennani is represented by Lodovico Corsini (Brussels, Belgium). She is also represented by Francois Ghebaly and Sadie Coles.
David Noonan
Mnemosyne, 2021
16mm film transferred to video (colour, sound)
20 min 35 sec
David Noonan’s film Mnemosyne (2021), named after the Greek goddess of memory, explores the shifting nature of remembrance. The artist assembles personal and public archives, creating a visual atlas reminiscent of the method of art historian Aby Warburg. This constellation of images configures links between events, gestures and beings, treating the video as a meditative wandering. Noonan has long been interested in the perception of time and the circulation of forms, working from images found in books, magazines or online. For Mnemosyne, he selected around fifty images accumulated over two decades. Shot in 16 mm with a Bolex camera, the film incorporates effects produced in a water tank where black and yellow pigments unfold in front of the images. The soundtrack, composed by Warren Ellis, echoes the floating atmosphere. The excavation of these images reveals the construction of history as an act of selection and interpretation. Memory thus appears as a subjective and poetic assemblage, a place to decide what remains and what disappears from our narratives.
David Noonan is represented by Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery (Gadigal Country/Sydney).
Mohamed Bourouissa
Temps Mort, with Al, 2009
video (colour and sound),
18 min 5 sec
Temps mort, with Al (2009) is a film compiled from short videos recorded over nine months by two prisoners using a mobile phone that had been smuggled into the prison. Following the artist’s instructions, a film takes shape through an exchange of SMS and MMS — a collaborative artwork. The fragments of daily life depict suspended time and the constrained bodies of incarcerated lives. As manifestations of digital obsolescence, the low-resolution images also reflect the precarity of the conditions within this space. Through this film-making process, Bourouissa offers the prisoners the right to their own image — the image being, for the artist, an object of power. “This work highlights an intimate relationship between a free person and an imprisoned one. We enter a kind of off-screen space, a form of free zone. It is the encounter between two temporalities: one slowed down, halted, frozen by the carceral environment, and the other rapid, relentless, constantly in motion,” says Bourouissa. Through this portrait of a “socially absent, confined” individual, the mechanisms of exclusion in contemporary societies are revealed.
Mohamed Bourouissa is represented by PALAS (Gadigal Country/Sydney).
Neïl Beloufa
Kempinski, 2007
14 Minutes
Editon of 5 plus 3 artist proofs
Kempinski (2007) is a science-fiction documentary without a script, in which Neïl Beloufa invites the inhabitants of a Malian village to speak about their vision of the future. In the middle of the night, illuminated by a lamp they hold in their hands, they describe in the present tense dreamlike and surreal visions in which cars speak, rockets spy on their lives, and humans and non-humans unite. Their stories transform this anonymous setting into a mystical and animist place, welcoming visions and fragmented memories. Interested in archetypes, Beloufa seems to echo artist Barbara Krüger’s statement, “the future belongs to those who can see it”, evoking the future and its articulation as both a site of power and a space for the liberation of imagination.
Neïl Beloufa is represented by Mendes Wood DM (São Paulo/Brussels/Paris/New York).