The One With The Manes

Opening February 2026

“The one with the manes” is a multimedia exhibition exploring a shared history between Morocco, Brazil, and Portugal through video installations, photographs, and watercolors. Inspired by a forced exodus across the Atlantic, the exhibition explores rituality, memory, archives, and embodiment. The installations offer subtle gestures that defamiliarize the art space and bear witness to the invisible erasures operated by power. ‘Manes,’ signifying both ancestral souls and lions’ manes, permeate the exhibition’s liquid, opaque structure. By focusing on sensory experiences, the installations aim to erode, infiltrate, and reimagine archives. It foregrounds bodies’ resonances through the past and present, envisioning liberatory futures.

Born and raised in Morocco, Yasmine Benabdallah has a BA in Film and Mathematics from Columbia University and an MA from the Experimental Programme in Political Arts at Sciences Po (SPEAP). She is currently pursuing a critical praxis PhD in Film and Digital Media at UC Santa Cruz researching the intersection of decolonial moving-image making, rituals, and archives. Her dissertation project is temporarily titled “‘The one with the manes’: Relating archives, rituality, and ocean worldviews through decolonial moving-image practices and translocal conversations in Morocco and Brazil.”

Last modified: Oct 25, 2024