Leila Alaoui explores identity, community and migration in her work. Principally photographic and filmic, it almost transgresses into documentary while remaining within the realm of art. It has an ability to act as a portrait onto social human behavior, interactions and representations.
She used photography and video to express various social realities through a visual language lying on the boundary between documentary and plastic arts. Leila Alaoui's work has always been strongly representative of a diverse range of communities that find themselves around the Mediterranean, either through migration or through origin.
One such project is Les Marocains (The Moroccans). It was a portrait project conducted through Morocco where, with a portable studio, she captured portraits of all kinds of people; men, women, children, arabs, berbers, drawing a portrait of a country through the dignified faces of its inhabitants.
Leila Alaoui was a very important photographer and video artist in the arab world. She was motivated to do humanitarian including various photographic missions for prominent NGOs, like the Danish Refugee Council, Search for Common Ground and HCR.
While working on an Amnesty International commission on women's rights in Burkina Faso, Leila Alaoui was seriously injured in a terrorist attack in Ouagadougou. She died on 18 January 2016. The Fondation Leila Alaoui was set up to preserve her work, defend her values and inspire and support others.
Adel Abdessemed Etel Adnan Ai Weiwei Leila Alaoui Juan Araujo Kader Attia Barbana Bojadzi Daniel Buren Cai Guo-Qiang Alejandro Campins Iván Capote Yoan Capote Loris Cecchini Elizabet Cerviño Chen Zhen Nikhil Chopra Marcelo Cidade Carlos Cruz-Diez Jonathas de Andrade Berlinde De Bruyckere Leandro Erlich Carlos Garaicoa Osvaldo González Antony Gormley Gu Dexin Shilpa Gupta Subodh Gupta Carsten Höller Eva Jospin JR Ilya & Emilia Kabakov Zhanna Kadyrova Kan Xuan Anish Kapoor André Komatsu Jannis Kounellis Julio Le Parc Luis López-Chávez Jorge Macchi Ahmed Mater Cildo Meireles José Mesías Sabrina Mezzaqui Moataz Nasr Rudi Ninov Giovanni Ozzola Ornaghi & Prestinari Hans Op de Beeck Michelangelo Pistoletto Susana Pilar Qiu Zhijie Tobias Rehberger Arcangelo Sassolino Manuela Sedmach Serse Kiki Smith Nedko Solakov Marta Spagnoli José Antonio Suárez Londoño Hiroshi Sugimoto Sun Yuan & Peng Yu Ana Maria Tavares Pascale Marthine Tayou Armando Testa Nari Ward Sislej Xhafa José Yaque Zhuang Hui