Hicham Benohoud was born in 1968 in Marrakech, Morocco, and now divides his time between Morocco and France. He earned a B.A. in visual arts and studied education in Marrakech. He first focused on painting, teaching visual arts for about a dozen years in a middle school in his native city. He then began to take photographs to help him with his painting. After a short training course, he started doing portraits of his students, painting pictures using the photos he had taken. This evolved into the photographic project The Classroom (1994-2001), which opened the doors of international recognition to him. His artistic vocation took precedence over his teaching career, and in 2003 he went to Strasbourg, France, to further his art education.
Through his different series, Benohoud attempts to bring out the common feeling of malaise in both individuals and groups, and he has explored identity through photographs of his own face in Version Soft (2002-2003), his naked body in Half Couple (2004), and the family circle in 30 Families (2005). In all these series, he applies the same theme of bodies under restraint. More recently, the Kinshasa series (2008) applies this approach to the black African continent. Colour portraits show the busts of young Congolese whose faces have been purposely misshapen by objects pressed against them: a string tightly drawn across them or a stick usher against them. When the features are distorted, it is left to the imagination of the onlooker to guess at the model’s actual physical appearance and social position. Intrusion (2009) is the artist’s most extreme series with the supreme obstruction it suggests: the penetration of foreign objects into the most intimate parts of the human body.
Benohoud’s photographs have been exhibited in group and solo shows in Europe, the Arab world, and Japan. Some of his recent group exhibitions are Le Pont (2013), Le musée contemporain de Marseille, France; I Exist (in Some Way) (2013), The Bluecoat, LOOK/13 Liverpool International Photography Festival; Paris and the Contemporary Arab Art (2012), The National Museum, Sana’a, Yemen; Voisinages III (2011), Galerie d’art l’Atelier 21, Casablanca, Morocco; and the touring exhibition Africa Remix (2006). His solo exhibitions include a 2013 show at Galleria Six, Milan; The Classroom (2012), Royal Mansour, Marrakech; and LIMIT – NO LIMIT (2009), Galerie VU, Paris.
