This prize is designed to support artistic and intellectual exchanges between the United States, France and the Arab world by rewarding one winner each year for his or her career and residency project. It is endowed with $15,000 in addition to the organisation of a two-month residency in the United States.
The jury for the call was composed of Antoine Artiganave, representative of the Recanati-Kaplan Foundation, Gaëtan Bruel, director of the Villa Albertine, Jack Lang, president of the Arab World Institute, Frédérique Mehdi, director of cultural actions at the Arab World Institute, and Mouna Mekouar, independent curator and art critic.
Laila Hida is a French-Moroccan artist based in Marrakech where she founded the multidisciplinary space, LE 18, in 2013. This collective space brings together artists, curators and researchers around meetings, exhibitions, workshops and residencies around various axes, in particular, image and representations, commonalities, orality, while questioning the modalities of mediation and curation.
Laila Hida's work explores, from intimate spaces and narratives, the place of the individual in a society in the grip of its mutations. She questions the projections and frictions of desires, ideas and concepts between the local and the regional, through curation, editing, installation and photography projects.
Her residency project, "The Journey of the Phoenix", questions the fabrication of imagination, starting with the representation of the oasis and its mythification in colonial travel literature and 19th century cinema. After initial research in Morocco as well as on the French Riviera in Nice, Laila Hida will then continue her research in Los Angeles this autumn to study the landscape and the history of imported palm trees. She intends to examine the conception of a city which is inspired by the notion of exoticism.
To know more about the artist: https://lailahida.com/