Meriem Bennani's CAPS Trilogy installed in active Essaouira boxing gym challenges exhibition norms

Meriem Bennani's first solo exhibition in Morocco, Life on the CAPS Trilogy, runs until 8 February inside an operational boxing gym in Essaouira. The New York-based Moroccan artist deliberately chose this active venue—one of the country's oldest boxing gyms—to create friction between fiction and lived reality. The exhibition features videos blending reality television, documentary footage, animated avatars, music video aesthetics, and smartphone images in what Bennani calls a 'hyperactivity of genre.' Some sequences were filmed in Essaouira itself, a port city with historical connections to Atlantic migration routes. The fictional island of CAPS, central to Bennani's science-fiction trilogy, serves as a non-place where intercepted migrants develop hybrid cultures. Bennani resists explaining Moroccan culture through her work, insisting meaning emerges through subjective encounter. The project was developed by platform NG, founded by Samy Ghiyati and Nicolas Nahab, with free, open events allowing artists, boxers, locals, and art professionals to mix without hierarchy. Boxers continue daily training sessions alongside the exhibition, creating what Bennani describes as inevitable disruption that prevents the artwork from being protected by institutional codes.