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.