Soukaina Joual often uses meat as a medium for her art. Joual is not afraid of blood, and doesn’t understand why anyone else would be, either, Zoë Hu writes in contemporary Middle Eastern arts and culture magazine Reorient. Flesh and blood lend much inspiration to Joual, the 26 year-old Moroccan artist whose work is described as spanning “multiple mediums and often invokes the raw, the red, and the repulsive. Because of its vivid imagery, it sometimes darts into the territory of gore; but what makes Joual’s pieces so provocative in particular is the playfulness involved. There is an underlying gesture in her oeuvre that swivels like a weathervane between the fake and the real.” Her first performance piece “I’m not so innocent” (runtime 05:43), for example, is gory, fascinating, and mind-numbing at the same time. In the performance, she takes a piece of meat, slices it, and then manually grinds it. “Flesh: I don’t know if I can call it alive or dead,” she says. “‘At one point it will rot, it will change. In a way, it’s still alive.’ The performance is about killing, of course, but also transformation and — another dry quip — the boredom that can be found in both processes.”

For her second performance piece, Joual veered away from meat. She attends a mass protest in Seoul, South Korea wearing a mirrored cube on her head. Joual says she attended the march not as a citizen or artist, but “as an incarnation, a mirror, a reflection of my external surroundings and how the world around us currently appears… I was reflecting light, physical images, people’s thoughts and actions.” Hu says the performance “evokes a Daft Punk-esque techno-future of dissent, wherein the watched and the watcher become endlessly confused. Whether it is Joual’s own observance of the protest, or the bystanders taking photos of her (and in turn, themselves reflected in her mirrors), the beam of surveillance bounces back and forth endlessly.”

On her work with meat, Joual tells Hu “what I found funny is that even people here who are used to seeing meat … pull back. They say, ‘Oh, that’s too much.’” Much of Joual’s work explores meat’s presence in Morocco and the MENA region, and her work could sometimes seem to have political undertones. “The Arab World, which she presented in 2014, is a map of the Middle East and North Africa reconfigured as a wall of packaged raw beef. Meat’s link to violence is an easily made one, and it only takes the viewer another thoughtless step forward to affix the MENA region onto that relationship; but Joual avoids the obvious constellation of meat-violence-Arab world, instead tinkering with a type of humour that seems almost prankish in how it addresses viewers. For example, an LED sign with the word ‘halal’ blazed into its surface may seem to signal vaguely towards meat’s position in a religious value system; yet, a second look discloses the mutually informative relation between language and sense of place that undergirds much of Joual’s work,” Hu explains. “The joke of the piece is perhaps its own redundancy. The sign’s neon glints slyly off people’s own assumptions, showing how attitudes towards meat are so unthinkingly rooted in personal context; Halal panels can be seen as a necessity, a logical fixture in the urban landscapes and immigrant neighbourhoods of Europe and America. For many, the sign is commercial and utilitarian.” Joual says her inspiration comes from Morocco. “Pointing to the café’s refrigerated display, in which sausage links and kebabs have been laid out like pieces of jewellery,” she tells Hu, “I see this image, and I want to take that whole thing and put it in a gallery. I want to say, ‘This is art.’”