Graduated from Institut National des Beaux-Arts de Tétouan, École Supérieure des Beaux – Arts d’Angers (France) and Fresnoy (France), Randa Maroufi is interested in staging groups in public place or in intimacy. Often by a political approach, which claims ambiguity to question the status of images and the limits of representation.
Performance, photography and video, these medium together allow the artist to be in the heart of social issues, peculiarly with the relation between cinema and contemporary art. From the beginning, the artist have been sculpting a gallery of figures and spaces by applying the notion of image. With series of photographs Reconstitution (2013) and Les Intruses (2018), the confrontational relations between male and female constitutes the fondamental of a process in the making.
Being presented at the gallery in form of video stills and framed in light boxes, the series Les intruses aims at uniting the inhabitants of Barbès around a work on the issue of sharing public space between women and men. During the shooting, the artist reverses the roles and stages a predominantly female occupation of certain sites where usually frequented by men.
Between fictions and documentaries, Randa Maroufi works also as a gleaner of images on the Internet. With what she collects, she cultivates the curiosity, observation of her fellow humans, in their most singular dimensions and their daily and digital concerns.
This also runs through in the film Le ParK. It is filmed in Casablanca with young people in an amusement park which has been abandonded these days. Amidst the debris and rusty merry-go-rounds, motionless and impenetrable characters are seized by the wandering camera, in a long tracking shot crossing the faded walls. They play, laugh, look surprised, stare at elsewhere or fight with each other, all are frozen in a waiting position.
When the general atmosphere of the film favors calm and tranquility, judicious work on the connections between the sequences suspends time and makes the viewer feel uncomfortable. Imminent and stifled violence permeates the images. Implicitly, we understand that these young people filmed in a group stage and pose to be photographed is for this «Facebook generation», what matters is being seen. Inspired by photographs from social media, these life scenes are cut apart from their context and they reveal the theatricality of everyday life. Between reality and fiction, Randa Maroufi blurs the tracks and thus questions the construction of images and the manipulation of reality. If the form is deliberately ambiguous, the speech is much less so. In fact, without political will, Randa Maroufi tends to look straight ahead at an era of multiple challenges and forms of violence.
Randa Maroufi was born in Casablanca in 1987, she works and lives in Paris. Graduated from Institut National des Beaux-Arts de Tétouan, École Supérieure des Beaux- Arts of Angers and Fresnoy, she has been a member at Casa de Velázquez – Academy of France in Madrid during 2017 – 2018.
Her works have been presented during the la Biennale de Marrakech in 2014, les Rencontres de Bamako in 2015, the Rotterdam International Festival in 2016, la Videonale Bonn in 2017, la Biennale de Sharjah in Lebanon in 2017, la Biennale de Dakar in 2018, la Biennale do Mercosul in Brazil in 2018, etc.
Her film Le Park has received over twenty awards and it is part of the National Collection at the CNAP (National Center for the Plastic Arts).In 2019, she won the tender of project Embellir Paris which is lauched by the city with her series Les Intruses.