Soukaina Joual is a Moroccan multi-disciplinary artist born in 1990, graduated from the National Institute of Fine Arts in Tetouan, Morocco in 2011. Her various works showcase an interest in how one’s body can translate and reflect various tensions, dynamics and differences. She usually focuses on the body from different perspectives: how it changes, its’ interaction with personal identity, and how it can also become a site to engage in important ideological debates.  

Most of the artist’s projects translate her commitment to various forms of presence, and how she trades various shifts between visibility and invisibility, belonging and absence. Joual uses the body as an object of myth, as a stand-in or a metaphor for society, to bring together the body as a historical form with a modernist perspective. She simultaneously blurs the lines between different dualities: public and private space, the individual and the community, the inside and the outside of our bodies; by elaborating proposals that tackle the limits between artistic intervention and everyday civic action.   

Throughout her practice, she intends to examine social issues of race, gender and sexuality. Her work interrogates how the body is psychically, socially, sexually and representationally produced. How the bodies can find their place in the chaos of individual desires, political constraints and social conventions and how to create universal and personal images of the body.

Joual participated in various projects in institutions and spaces in Morocco (Goethe-Institut Marokko, L’appartement 22, Le Cube Independent Art room, Kulte gallery, Le 18 Marrakesh), Palestine (Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center), Spain (Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Art Madrid PROYECTOR’20), Germany (Halle 14, The 5th New Talents Biennale Cologne), Austria (Philomena.plus), France (Friche de la Belle de Mai, Cité Internationale des Arts de Paris, La Galerie Du Crous De Paris, IESA), Japan (Sunday Issue Gallery, Ken Nakahashi Gallery, Block House, Space Jikka), Egypt (MASS Alexandria, Medrar), Tunisia (SeeDjerba), South Korea (Seoul Art Space GEUMCHEON), Holland (Cobra Museum), Switzerland (International Performance Art Giswil, Pro Helvetia Studio Residency). Belgium (Bozar Centre of Fine Arts), Mexico (Hay Festival), she has received an Award grant by Ford Foundation for the program the Creativity and Civic Space.

Soukaina Joual is 1/5 of the artist group K-OH-llective.