Soukaina Joual, b. 1990, Fez, Morocco.
Lives and works in Rabat, Morocco.
Soukaina Joual is a Moroccan multi-disciplinary artist. Her videos, performances, paintings and installations showcase an interest in how one’s body can translate and reflect various tensions, dynamics, and differences. She often uses her own body as a medium, as part of her research material, or as means of experimentation. 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. Her work is extremely contextual, as she lets her surroundings, people and places inform her artwork process.
Soukaina Joual participated in various projects in institutions and spaces in Morocco and abroad like L’appartement22, Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Halle 14, philomena.plus, PROGR, Cité Internationale des Arts de Paris, La Friche la Belle de Mai, Sunday Issue Gallery, MASS Alexandria, Medrar, SeeDjerba, Seoul Art Space GEUMCHEON.
As of January 2022
During her stay in Egypt, the works she produced questioned the notions and stereotypes that are still strongly tied to her national identity as a Moroccan woman. The work questions the position and the exact role of the herbalist in Moroccan society nowadays as well as the connection between contemporary forms of spiritual healing and magic rituals in Egypt and Morocco.
A video-performance that represents a simple repetitive process of cleaning the bills, each one of them becomes slowly damaged, shredded and loses its function or value. The performance contemplates notions of disappearance, transmutation and going back to the original state.
A Neon light installation taking shape after a quote from the book “For Bread Alone” by the Moroccan writer Mohamed Choukri. The book reveals the social and political structure of colonialism through the misery of Choukri’s childhood and adolescence, who followed his family in exodus from the Rif to Tangier, where he resided until his passing in 2003.
Through the use of language and other forms of expression as a position, the work tries to debunk certain connotations tied to spoken phrases. By breaking up مذبوح على الطريقة الإسلامية (slaughtered in the Islamic way) in four parts, passersby only experience a fragment of thought.
The Arab world is represented by the figure of a Bullock ready to be cut into pieces. The work emphasizes at once a deadly future to which these countries seem to be destined, and the possibilities that could emerge from this association.