Malik
Nejmi

Malik Nejmi

biography


Malik Nejmi is a Franco-Moroccan photographer born in 1973, based in Orléan (France).

After a first photographic reportage in Benin in 1999, Malik Nejmi discovered and forged what would become, within an extreme variety of forms and techniques, the main focus of his work. It consists of two parts: one engaged, often taking the form of small photographic narratives where documentary investigation and anthropological questions (mainly in Africa) allow him to broaden the artistic melting pot and the reconquest of a territory linked to childhood and ritual. He often accompanies communities and families, his work being attached to this notion of belonging to the group.

The other, broader, is dedicated to reconnecting with Morocco, the country his father left to join France.

Malik Nejmi first leaves alone to return to his father’s country, following a man who talks about the country while walking, “we walk to disappear, when we no longer have an identity”, and meets everywhere “the gaze of a man sitting alone in his thoughts, the gaze of depression, the frozen image of the Arab who dreams of leaving…”. Malik Nejmi will eventually bring his father back to the land of denial, and lend him a sensitive geography to express himself. “The past, Daddy, is the tax on immigrants”. This work will be published in three volumes under the title “El Maghreb” (2001-2005).

In 2008 and 2009, he worked on the rejection suffered by disabled children in Africa, first at the Bamako Nursery, then in Kenya in a traditional Massai environment, and in Madagascar with twins from the village of Mananjary.

In 2009 he also participated in the Mosaics Public Order on cultural diversity in France and was invited to participate in the Paris Photo 2009 statement “Arab countries invited”.

In 2019, he is leading a project on the emergence of an informal Christian religious sector in Morocco with socio-anthropologist Sophie Bava and anthropologist Bernard Coyault. His images document the work of the two researchers at the crossroads of their anthropological fields in the J5 district of Rabat, where most of the migrants live.

In 2005, he received the Kodak Prize for Photographic Criticism, a special mention from the Jury of the 2006 Nadar Book Prize for the book El Maghreb, and the 2007 Photography Prize from the Academy of Fine Arts. In 2009, he received a research and exhibition support grant from the ACSÉ (Laos project, return to the land of ancestors and spirits), and in 2011 the CNAP grant for his Entrada project, an autobiographical migratory journey around major European cities (Barcelona, Marseille, Hamburg, Rotterdam …).

He has exhibited at the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie d’Arles, the Cité Nationale de l’Histoire de l’Immigration, the Musée des Beaux-Arts d’Orléans, the Musée de Marrakech, the Rencontres Africaines de la photographie de Bamako, in Norway at the Fotofest, at the Cité Nationale de l’Histoire de l’Immigration and in Cambodia at the Pnom Phen Photo Festival.

His recent works are in the collections of the BnF, the HSBC foundation, the CNAP, the C.N.H.I. and the French Development Agency.

Series


God Will Open the Sea, 2022

Series | In Rabat, a place where old and new migrants meet, house churches are emerging. A few dozen faithful meet to pray, discuss and exchange on life projects in and outside Morocco.

Ethnocape, 2014

Series | A photographic travel project that questions the symbolic journey of a migrant.

A bird in the hand worth two in the bush, 2009

Serie| For two years, Malik Nejmi has been documenting the lives of children who have been excluded from their families because they were born different.

El Maghreb #3, 2005

Serie| Malik Nejmi and his mother, wife and son accompanied his father to Morocco.

El Maghreb #2, 2004

Serie| Malik Nejmi returned to Morocco two years after the death of his grandmother Aïcha, with the idea of a kind of family survey as a counterpoint to his father's silence.

El Maghreb #1, 2001

Série| For the first time Malik Nejmi accompanied by his uncles, aunts and cousins from Orleans, stayed in Morocco without his parents.

God Will Open the Sea, 2022

Series | In Rabat, a place where old and new migrants meet, house churches are emerging. A few dozen faithful meet to pray, discuss and exchange on life projects in and outside Morocco.

Ethnocape, 2014

Series | A photographic travel project that questions the symbolic journey of a migrant.

A bird in the hand worth two in the bush, 2009

Serie| For two years, Malik Nejmi has been documenting the lives of children who have been excluded from their families because they were born different.

El Maghreb #3, 2005

Serie| Malik Nejmi and his mother, wife and son accompanied his father to Morocco.

El Maghreb #2, 2004

Serie| Malik Nejmi returned to Morocco two years after the death of his grandmother Aïcha, with the idea of a kind of family survey as a counterpoint to his father's silence.

El Maghreb #1, 2001

Série| For the first time Malik Nejmi accompanied by his uncles, aunts and cousins from Orleans, stayed in Morocco without his parents.

God Will Open the Sea, 2022

Series | In Rabat, a place where old and new migrants meet, house churches are emerging. A few dozen faithful meet to pray, discuss and exchange on life projects in and outside Morocco.

Ethnocape, 2014

Series | A photographic travel project that questions the symbolic journey of a migrant.

A bird in the hand worth two in the bush, 2009

Serie| For two years, Malik Nejmi has been documenting the lives of children who have been excluded from their families because they were born different.

El Maghreb #3, 2005

Serie| Malik Nejmi and his mother, wife and son accompanied his father to Morocco.

El Maghreb #2, 2004

Serie| Malik Nejmi returned to Morocco two years after the death of his grandmother Aïcha, with the idea of a kind of family survey as a counterpoint to his father's silence.

El Maghreb #1, 2001

Série| For the first time Malik Nejmi accompanied by his uncles, aunts and cousins from Orleans, stayed in Morocco without his parents.

videos


HAFA, 2018

During a research stay in Tangier, Malik Nejmi is working on the story of Omar Ba, a Senegalese migrant in transit. From this experience was born an exchange of films and objects. A child’s sandal, a cloth, a jerrycan, a prayer book became the haunting object of another quest, of a new mythology. The question then arises of how to “remember” these migratory stories. Here he proposes a staging in a film essay with the dancer Barbara Sarreau.

Director : Malik Nejmi

Production : le G.R.E.C

With Camargo Foundation & Fondation Nationale d’Arts Graphiques et Plastiques

Crossings, 2017

“An ethno-poetic investigation, a wander through an Afro-futuristic Casablanca, a heroic quest for the migrant who has now disappeared but who is nevertheless there, everywhere in us, and through whom our Western societies feel today crossed.”

Beyond the political dimension of migration, this creation seeks to delve into the marvellous and the dream to evoke more painful subjects linked to departure: the burning, the loss of reference points, separation, disappearance. The result of this liminal experience is the desire for the four artists to reconcile this intimate feeling that the migratory narrative and their respective artistic practices could “ward off bad luck”, tell us and give us a different view of migration.

Traversés is a performing film-novel, inspired by a research conducted by Malik Nejmi in Tangier with Omar Ba, a Senegalese migrant in transit in Morocco who transmitted to the artist a set of objects from the crossing of the Strait of Gibraltar as well as a series of films that they both imagined and produced. Around a device with four practices, the prepared piano (Laurent Durupt), slam (Mehdi Krüger), performance (Touda Bouanani) and photography and video (Malik Nejmi) are confronted with the presence on stage of a set of objects from migration that belonged to Omar. Their presence refers us to the absence of the migrant, whose voice reaches us through a dream, while the two narrators’ fragmented narration slowly guides us towards a fiction that is sometimes reminiscent of Chris Marker’s The Pier.

For the four artists, migration then becomes the place of experience, a common space of thought that is only made possible by the displacement of the border.

An odyssey, 2015

As part of an invitation for an artistic residency in the Mediterranean, Malik Nejmi shares the crossing of the Strait of Gibraltar with a scientific team and sailors studying climate change and plastic pollution. During this leg (Barcelona-Tangiers crossing), the artist seeks in the intimacy on board to be told about the dreams and the marvellous aspect of the sea journey. This request is translated into a series of black and white video portraits where he films the swinging of each person’s body in a simple cabin on the boat.

The triptych video installation Une Odyssée works to the rhythm of Laurent Durupt’s music (piano, percussion), the poem written and read by Touda Bouanani, and the performance of the invited artists.

Les morts ne sont pas morts, 2014

Production of Malik Nejmi

2012-2014 Villa Medicis, Institut Français de Florence, KUlte Gallery

“Malik Nejmi’s film opens with a collective commemoration in a mosque. The film is followed by images and sound throughout the sequences. The artist invites us to contemplation and meditation. Through the phrase of the doctor-poet Birago Diop, “the dead are not dead”, we seek the presence of the disappeared through faces, places and words. The religious is here put at the service of a commitment and a cause: that of the human being, whatever his country, his religion, his colour. Political discourse relays religious discourse through demonstrations, messages and slogans. The testimony of the photographer-filmmaker invites us to maintain the social link that allows us to continue to work with generosity and to honour those who have left us.”

Jalil Bennani

Interviews


Portrait of Malik NEJMI, artist supported by the FNAGP patronage commission
ADAGP with the support of Arte Créative

2018

Portrait of Malik NEJMI, artiste supported by the FNAGP patronage commission.
Project title: Les morts ne sont pas les morts, 2014.

Polizones
RFIEA

2016

Within the framework of his research project with the Institutes for Advanced Studies, Malik Nejmi seeks to understand the Mediterranean area from the perspective of (re)conquest.

Exhibitions


Dieu va ouvrir la mer

May 18 to June 30, 2023

Forum de l’Humathèque Condorcet

BOOKS


El Magreb

Home Cooking Books - 2006

El Magreb

Home Cooking Books - 2006

El Magreb

Home Cooking Books - 2006

awards


2020
Support for creation, Centre National des Arts Plastiques 

For ” Wess Wess “.

2018
Documentary photography grant, Centre National des Arts Plastiques 

For ” God will open the sea “.

2015
Fellow research, Mediterranean Institute of Advanced Research (IMéRA Marseille)

For his research work in Tangier ” Lost and Found “.
Creation grant, Fondation des Artistes 
For his research work on Senegalese migration (Dakar, Tangier)

2013-2014
Villa Medici, Académie de France à Rome

For “The Moroccan room” and the video “4160”

2009
Public commission, Centre National des Arts Plastiques

Mosaics, on cultural diversity in France.

2007
First prize in Photography at the Académie des Beaux-Arts

For ” A bird in the hand worth two in the bush”

2005
Special mention, Nadar Book Prize 

Kodak Prize of the Photographic Critics 
For “El Maghreb”