Maurice Benayoun
Maurice Benayoun is a media artist. He is born in Mascara, Algeria, in 1957 and lives in Paris.
Maurice Benayoun [photo: Jan Sprij]
Benayoun’s work explores the potentiality of various media from video to virtual reality, Web and wireless art, large scale art installations in public space, and interactive exhibitions. Benayoun's work has been widely exhibited all over the world and received numerous international awards and prizes.
During the 1980s, Benayoun directed video installations and short films about contemporary artists, including Daniel Buren, Jean Tinguely, Sol Lewitt and Martial Raysse. He co-founded Z-A in 1987, a cutting-edge computer graphics and Virtual Reality lab in order to explore the potential of emerging artistic tools.
After 1993, he starts creating Virtual Reality and interactive art installations. Among them, in 1995, the Tunnel Under the Atlantic, a televirtual project linking the Pompidou centre, in Paris, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Montreal. In 1998, Benayoun won the Golden Nica at Ars Electronica, in the Interactive Art category, for World Skin, a Photo Safari in the Land of War. Both World Skin and The Tunnel are considered by critics to be key works in the field of interactive art.
Benayoun is presently in charge of the permanent exhibition of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, attempting to shift the meaning of the monument toward a reflection on symbolic architecture.
Since 1984, Benayoun has been teaching video and media art at the Université de Paris 1 (Panthéon-Sorbonne). He was artist-in-residence at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts, National Fine Arts School of Paris. He is co-founder and art director of the CITU research center (Création Interactive Transdisciplinaire Universitaire) Universités Paris 1 and Paris 8, dedicated to research and creation (R&C) in the emerging forms of art.
At various occasions Maurice Benayoun has presented works at V2_. In 1998, he participated in the exhibition TransArchitecture, organized by V2_ at the NAi, in 2004 he was part of the seminar The Art of Immersive Spaces at DEAF04, in 2006 he presented at Test_Lab: Immersive Mixed Reality Environments, and in 2010 at Test_Lab: Tools for Propaganda. In 2007, he performed at the Evening of 25 Years of V2_, part of DEAF07. His installation World Skin was presented at V2_ during the 39th International Film Festival Rotterdam and the 'Rotterdamse Museumnacht' 2010.
