BIOGRAPHY

Born in 1995 in Rabat, Ziad Naitaddi is a self-taught artist who lives and works in Salé, Morocco. His affection for the visual arts first developed through the cinema, through Fouad, a seller of pirated DVDs from the medina of Rabat, who introduced him to a wide range of films and directors. Quickly, he became interested in the hybridity of the photographic medium which offered him a bias of choice to explore his favorite subjects, in an approach halfway between documentary and fiction. He has been photographing since 2015, mainly in black and white, and explores the experimental possibilities of the medium. If he oscillates between digital and pre-digital practice, he favors the slowness of the process of the latter to short-circuit the proliferation of images of our daily lives. So much so that he sometimes moves away from the physical act of photographing. In this perspective, he reappropriates archives, written and oral testimonies or even returns to his own photographs a few years after their development. He calls all these narrative possibilities, which go beyond the mere use of the camera, photographic exhumation. This diversified practice of photography is also a desire to offer other representations of Morocco and its imaginations. His relationship to the medium is as much linked to a way of life, Ziad Naitaddi surveys and contemplates daily varied landscapes in Morocco and elsewhere, as to a way of doing with photography. By using his technical potential, he transcribes this wandering in moving and enigmatic images. In his latest projects, he explores the subject of migration and its corollaries - the distance from the native land, the feeling of exile, integration or exclusion - which he considers as the space of a complex encounter. Each time, he gets intimately close to the people he photographs and tries to understand the changes in moods that take place over the course of their migration. Well aware of working under the prism of his personal perception, he also reflects on the construction and evolution of his own identity. For him, photography is an eminently collaborative gesture. Through his photographic writings, with an intimate and political tone, Ziad Naitaddi seeks to question the difficulty of reporting, through still images, inner emotions. He has participated in several exhibitions and publications in Morocco and abroad - at the Center d'Art Contemporain Photographique - Villa Pérochon, at the 13th Biennale of Dakar, at the Dapper Foundation, at the 16th Angkor Photo Festival in Cambodia, Sharjah Art Foundation in the United Arab Emirates. In 2017, he won the first prize of the jury of the Les Nuits Photographiques d'Essaouira festival. Ziad Naitaddi is represented by Galerie 127.