Mounir Ayache

Mounir Ayache, born in 1991, is a French-Moroccan artist based in Marseille and Marrakech. He makes video games, augmented-reality sculptures, installations built with 3D scanning and photogrammetry, and digital prints. He uses speculative fiction to rework images of North Africa, West Africa and the Arab world inherited from Western representations.

Khadija (2020), shown at Manifesta 13 in Marseille, is an installation with projection and a Kawasaki robotic arm. As a fellow at the Villa Medici in Rome from 2022 to 2023, he developed augmented-reality sculptures for a science-fiction narrative set in the year 2500 and based on the diplomat and scholar Hassan al-Wazzan (Leo Africanus). Al-Wazzan was the author of the Cosmographia de Affrica (1525).

He graduated from the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2017. His Una linea storta tesa (2023) was in Arabofuturs: Science fiction and new imaginations at the Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris, in 2024. In 2025 his work was shown at the Jeu de Paume in Paris, at the Musée d'art contemporain de Lyon and in Sensitive Machine at the Cité des Arts de la Réunion in Saint-Denis. In 2026 he was named laureate of the Recanati-Kaplan Prize, with a Villa Albertine residency in the United States, for Leon the African 2575.