Sparkling Molotovs and Autonomous geographies - 2013-14
set of multimedia installations School of Visual Arts - MFA Thesis, Photo Video, and related media, 2014 - Urban Weastern screening curated by Tiger Cai, 25th Bowery nyc 2015, Marrakech Biennale - Off 2016, 1:54 AAF London 2017
In the wake of the Moroccan Arab Spring uprising, Yasmine Laraqui reflects on the global allure of mass demonstrations, from protests to rave parties. She questions the extent to which the easthetics of mass gatherings - as experienced in real time and online - have overwhelmed their ostensible aim of social commentary or political revolution.
Bonnie Yochelson, art curator
A female artist originally from Morocco, Yasmine Laraqui continuously provokes mainstream thoughts on female identities in the Arabic world through her work. Laraqui’s video resonates with the themes of Tiger’s work in many ways. The work she presents at the screening, Sparkling Molotov, is a short video on revolution. By juxtaposing spectacular images both from footage of protests all over the Mid East and images of overwhelming western-style social media lives and parties, she offers a critique of the fanaticism of revolution fantasies as well as utopian dreams through her female perspective.
Tiger Cai
THEMIS CITY - 2012
The work is a multimedia installation piece, composed of text videos and digital paintings integrated into geometrical plastic elements. We're building a dystopian city based on the architecture of the panopticon, in which plastic elements shape colorful skyscrapers. We're exploring Foucault's idea as reshaped by the digital era by people such as William Bogard; that we are somehow heading to surveillance that would be its own simulation. "Increasingly the technological enlargement of the field of perceptual control, the erasure of distance in the speed of electronic information has pushed surveillance beyond the very limits of speed toward the purest form of anticipation"
Inspired by this, we thought of this transparent and visually attractive city, where people as contributors of their own shared databases would see personalized ads catchphrases (taken from real suggested websites through Facebook, etc) and surrealist cityscapes as representing their supposed geolocalization. The very idea of the panopticon is annihilated as a result of new social structures (physical and virtual) where each individual is self-conditioned to share and expose personal information. In this way, the order imagined to "discipline and punish" becomes ironically the ideal of human interactions.