Yasmine Laraqui (b. 1989, Casablanca) is a curator and visual artist working across photography, painting, and experimental visual forms. Her practice explores the circulation of images, technology, and speculative narratives, questioning how visual languages travel across cultures and geographies. She earned a BFA from ENSA Paris-Cergy (2012) and an MFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York (2014). In 2017, she founded DASTHE ART SPACE, an independent platform where she curated solo and group exhibitions in physical and online formats. The initiative later evolved into LY CONNECTS, a production company launched in 2023. Her work has been exhibited in internationally, including appearances at the Marrakech Biennale, Photo L.A., 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair, Spectrum Art Fair (Miami Basel Week), and PhotoMed Festival. Initially shown widely as a photographer, her recent exhibitions have expanded toward painting. She participated in a contemporary thinkers residency at Das Weisse Haus, Vienna in 2016 and wrote at Acentric Space, Shanghai in 2024. Alongside her visual work, she writes speculative fiction. Her forthcoming novels MENTAL (2025) and IMMERSIONS (2026) explore surveillance, technology, and altered states of consciousness. She will be artist-in-residence at SOMOS ART BERLIN in January–February 2026.

Website www.yasminelaraqui.net

contact@yasminelaraqui.com

Statement

Although physical geographies seem to echo hostility, the utopic notion of world society has never been as technically reachable as it is through the digital. The internet has enabled a wider map of representations doubled with an instant way of accessing information.
 More importantly, the digital revolution made us aware of our contemporaries and their ideas, all around the world and in real-time. For the art world, the internet appears to be the perfect space for experimenting with borderlessness, multicultural appreciation, and finally, fully digital formats. Since everyone produces images, everyone produces information. Paradoxically, because of the accuracy of algorithm targeting, this supposedly widens the spectrum of diverse information and ends up looking like a comfortable bubble of pleasing and like-minded data sharers. Thirty years ago, Flusser wrote that we were entering a Post-historical and dimensionless era through and within which all our information would merge to form a “global brain”. this visionary statement raised sociological implications including mutational notions of cultures and the contemporary relevance of nationality within cyberspace worldwide. With an interest in cultural studies, I delved into post-colonial studies, I started thinking of the notion of identification on a broader spectrum- that of a global phenomenon motivated by concurrent ideologies. Being simultaneously familiar and distant from the culture I am assimilated to, my work aims to remap the idea of a North-South/ EastWest culture shock. I transport the viewer into cultural identities’ explorations, questioning the socially accepted symbols and frames of reference that shape the given identity. My work, very much like postmodernism’s deconstruction of socio-cultural understanding, is a journey into the de-contextualization of codes and conduct. Reshaping of accepted belief, which inherently injects emotions of confusion, and discomfort – all emotions that oil the wheel of thought and perspective. Through the use of visually pleasing mass multimedia installations, I can translate thought into experience, offering a fluid platform for reflection. Consequently, this investigation into the processes of identification can be seen as social determinism and perhaps results in personal acculturation. Yasmine LARAQUI