Ziad Naitaddi

Born in 1995 in Rabat, Ziad Naitaddi is a self-taught artist who lives and works in Salé, Morocco. His passion for visual arts initially developed through cinema, thanks to Fouad, a seller of pirated DVDs in 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 provided him with a preferred avenue to explore his subjects, in a process halfway between documentary and fiction. Since 2015, he has been predominantly photographing in black and white, experimenting with the possibilities of the medium.

While he oscillates between digital and pre-digital practices, he favors the slow process of the latter to counteract the proliferation of images in our daily lives. This sometimes leads him to distance himself from the physical act of photography. In this regard, he reappropriates archives, written and oral testimonies, or even revisits his own photographs several years after development.

He calls all these narrative possibilities, which go beyond the mere use of the photographic device, "photographic exhumation." This diversified practice of photography is also a desire to offer alternative representations of Morocco and its imaginaries.

His relationship with the medium is as much about a way of life - Ziad Naitaddi daily explores and contemplates various landscapes in Morocco and elsewhere - as it is about a way of working with photography. By using its technical potential, he translates this wandering into images with a fluid and enigmatic appearance.

In his recent projects, he explores the subject of migration and its corollaries - the distancing from one's homeland, the feeling of exile, integration, or exclusion - which he considers as the space of a complex encounter. Each time, he intimately approaches the people he photographs and seeks to understand the changes in their emotional states over the course of their migration journey. Fully aware that he works through the prism of his personal perception, he also reflects on the construction and evolution of his own identity.

For him, photography is an inherently collaborative gesture. Through his photographic writings, which have both an intimate and political tone, Ziad Naitaddi seeks to question the difficulty of capturing inner emotions through a still image.

He has participated in several exhibitions and publications in Morocco and abroad, including the Contemporary Photographic Art Center - Villa Pérochon, the 13th Dakar Biennale, the 16th Angkor Photo Festival in Cambodia, the Sharjah Art Foundation in the United Arab Emirates, and the 18th Marrakech Biennale. In 2017, he won the first prize of the jury at the Les Nuits Photographiques d'Essaouira festival.