Hicham Benohoud

LA SALLE DE CLASSE

1994 – 2000

silver gelatin prints

50 × 60 cm / 60 × 50 cm

As soon as I started teaching, I realized how socially and economically trapped my pupils were. They’re at school because it’s compulsory, but they have no prospects for the future because they come from disadvantaged social backgrounds that don’t help them to blossom. Most of these students end up leaving high school before the baccalaureate, which they don’t manage to obtain. The boys end up working (laborers, farmers, security guards) and the girls end up getting married for the luckiest of them. The situation is terrible, and nothing is being done at the political level to improve or change the fate of these people, who have resigned to social fatalism for several decades. As an artist, I can’t be insensitive to all these dramatic situations which, for want of action, I can only denounce artistically and with the means at hand.

(Hicham Benohoud in: «People are resigned to social fatalism» – Hicham Benohoud’s work depicts Morocco, LAMPOON, August 28, 2023)

These black-and-white silver gelatin photographs, collectively titled LA SALLE DE CLASSE, belong to a corpus of more than one hundred images created between 1994 and 2000, during the artist’s tenure as an art teacher in a Marrakech school. The series emerged from a performative experiment involving his students. Benohoud assigned each pupil specific physical constraints—prescribed poses, gestures, or movements—and outfitted them with an array of unconventional accessories. These objects, ranging from nested boxes and wire to shards of broken mirrors and sweeping rolls of paper or fabric, conjure a theatre of childhood psychology, generating a palpable tension between innocent play and symbolic violence.

In many of these meticulously orchestrated scenes, the ordinary rhythm of the classroom continues undisturbed in the background: children sit diligently at their desks while others appear as surreal marionettes, seemingly “beheaded,” impeded, or suspended from the ceiling as though the spatial confines of the classroom had been forcibly expanded. Trapped within this almost hermetic interior—its windows scarcely visible—the students’ bound and constrained bodies are transformed through Benohoud’s masterful use of light into what he called “living sculptures.” The imagery evokes both the tradition of pantomime and the oppressive atmosphere of an institutional environment.

In LA SALLE DE CLASSE, the photographer is no accidental observer. Instead, he becomes a director orchestrating a series of tableaux in which his pupils enact the complex power dynamics between individual and institution. The work collapses the usual distance separating photographer, subject, and viewer, prompting audiences to confront their own reactions—whether pleasure, unease, or ambivalence—when faced with these enigmatic scenes. It also invites reflection on the years devoted to this “fool’s game,” staged on the periphery of school life and in moments of downtime. Allegorically, the series speaks to the cultural and religious constraints that shape personal behavior within Moroccan society. As is characteristic of Benohoud’s oeuvre, its social critique and subversive undertones are articulated with a delicate mixture of irony and deliberate lightness.