Leila Alaoui

Born

10 July 1982, Paris

Died

18 January 2016, Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso

Medium

Photography and video

In the Wild Project Gallery record

WPG.02 Luxembourg Art Week, first edition – Luxembourg (Nov 2015); homage at WPG.13 Art Paris, stand E17 – Grand Palais, Paris (Mar 2017)

Leila Alaoui (1982–2016) was a Franco-Moroccan photographer and video artist. Born in Paris and raised in Marrakesh, she studied photography in New York before basing her practice between Morocco, France, and Lebanon. Her subject was identity in movement: migration across and around the Mediterranean, told in a language that joined documentary storytelling to a formal, fine-art portraiture.

Two bodies of work anchor her record. No Pasara (2008), commissioned by the European Union, followed young Moroccans confronting the closed door of Europe. The Moroccans, begun in 2010 and titled in echo of Robert Frank's The Americans, took a mobile studio through rural Morocco to make monumental color portraits against a black ground — the series by which her work is most widely known. Her three-screen video installation Crossings (2013) carried the testimony of sub-Saharan migrants who had made the journey north.

Wild Project Gallery presented her work in its first months, at the inaugural Luxembourg Art Week in November 2015, catalogued here as WPG.02; the gallery's later roster pages listed her in memoriam through the site's final 2022 state.

In January 2016 Alaoui was in Burkina Faso on assignment for Amnesty International's My Body My Rights campaign, on women's rights. On 15 January she was shot and gravely wounded in the attack on the Splendid Hotel and Cappuccino café in Ouagadougou; she died of her injuries on 18 January 2016, at thirty-three. Amnesty International recorded her death together with that of her driver, Mahamadi Ouédraogo.

The posthumous record is substantial. Her family established the Fondation Leila Alaoui in March 2016 to preserve her archive and support work in the spirit of hers. The sixth Marrakech Biennale (2016) and the second Biennale of Photography in the Contemporary Arab World, organized in Paris in 2017 by the Institut du monde arabe and the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, were dedicated to her memory. At Art Paris 2017, Wild Project Gallery's stand E17 included an homage to her — WPG.13 in this catalogue — and her work has since entered public collections, including Qatar Museums.