Screening: Meriem Bennani’s ‘Life on the CAPS’ trilogy

On the occasion of ‘Nonmemory,’ a group exhibition curated by Jay Ezra Nayssan and organized in collaboration with the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts, please join us for a screening of artist Meriem Bennani’s ‘Life on the CAPS’ film trilogy. 

Expanding on artist Mike Kelley’s interests in the complex relationship between space, memory and identity, Bennani’s ‘Life on the CAPS’ employs her home country Morocco as a proxy setting for a dystopic fictional island where migrants attempting to teleport across the Atlantic are held in captivity. 

‘Life on the CAPS’ (2018 – 2022) 
By Meriem Bennani 
76 min 

Tickets for this event are free, however, on behalf of the artist Meriem Bennani, we encourage you to make a donation to support the temporary re-housing of families displaced by the recent earthquake in the Al Haouz region of Morocco. This fundraising effort is led by the Djebli Club, Association bénévoles Al Amal and LaVallée, in partnership with Berrraka, among others. Click here to learn more about the organizations and to donate.

Event registration is recommended. Click here to register.

About Mike Kelley 
Over the course of his four-decade career, Mike Kelley (1954 – 2012) produced a provocative and rich oeuvre that conflates the highest and lowest forms of popular culture in a relentless critical examination of social relations, cultural identity, and systems of belief. Through an extensive variety of media, including drawing, painting and sculpture, video and photography, performance, music, and a formidable body of critical writing, Kelley sought to reveal the unexpected connections and contradictions of the American vernacular. 

About The Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts 
The Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts advances the artist’s spirit of critical thinking, risk taking, and provocation in the arts. Established by Kelley in 2007, the Foundation seeks to further Kelley’s philanthropic work through grants to arts organizations and artists for innovative projects that reflect his multifaceted artistic practice.  

The Foundation also preserves the artist’s legacy more broadly and fosters the understanding of his life and creative achievements through educational initiatives including exhibitions, educational events, publications and the preservation and care of the Foundation’s art collections and archives. 

About Nonmemory 
Curated by Jay Ezra Nayssan, ‘Nonmemory’ brings together six seminal works by Mike Kelley and a group of seven contemporary artists – Kelly Akashi, Meriem Bennani, Beatriz Cortez, Raúl de Nieves, Olivia Erlanger, Max Hooper Schneider, Lauren Halsey – whose works all play with the role of memory as it posits our perceptions of space and place. Through a variety of media and material, the artists in this exhibition use space as the repository for dreams, fantasies, traumas, and anxieties, while offering opportunities to re-imagine and recreate reality. The title of the exhibition ‘Nonmemory,’ takes direct inspiration from Kelley’s use of the term, a way of treating, reordering, and representing the complex and unstable relationship between memory, space, and identity. 

About Meriem Bennani 
Meriem Bennani was born in 1988, in Rabat, Morocco and today lives and works in New York City, New York. Bennani received her BFA from The Cooper Union in 2012 after receiving her MFA in Animation from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, France in 2011. Moving between the aesthetics of reality television, documentary, animation and more, Bennani’s videos and installations embrace play and the absurd, while contemplating the intricacies of human behavior.  

About Del Vaz Projects 
Founded in 2014 by Jay Ezra Nayssan, Del Vaz Projects is an arts nonprofit based in Los Angeles, California. Beginning as an alternative exhibition space located in Nayssan’s home, Del Vaz Projects has expanded over the last decade into a curatorial platform, independent press, and artist production fund. In addition to the on-site projects at Del Vaz Projects, Nayssan has organized exhibitions and programming for galleries and institutions, including this year’s inaugural series of off-site projects at Frieze Los Angeles.