CASA

CASA is the inaugural exhibition of the Musée de la Photographie et des Arts Visuels de Casablanca, a new museum on Rue Larache in the old medina. The group show opened with the museum on 23 June 2026. It brings together 47 Moroccan and international photographers and visual artists from several generations. Framed black-and-white and colour prints hang on painted partition walls and on the bare concrete of the building.

The title is the short name residents use for their city every day. The exhibition reads Casablanca as a place of contrasts that never stops changing. It does so through documentary photographs and works from the visual arts, arranged as a sequence of fragments rather than one fixed portrait. Historical photographs sit beside contemporary series, among them pictures by Sultan Moulay Abdelaziz and colour portraits of the aïta singer Bouchaïb Al Bidaoui.

Press reports from the opening describe several bodies of work. Khalil Nemmaoui records the city's old cinemas, Déborah Benzaquen photographs a boxing gym, and Fatima Mazmouz returns to the former Bousbir district. The list of artists also includes Daoud Aoulad-Syad, Lalla Essaydi, Hicham Gardaf, Leila Alaoui, Lamia Naji, Malik Nejmi and Yoriyas. Several works are loans from the collection of the Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris.

The building is by the Japanese architect Tadao Ando, and the Fondation Nationale des Musées describes it as his only work in Africa. It keeps the arcades and older walls of the site and adds an extension in bare concrete. A long glass frontage lets people in the street see inside. The foundation took over the museum under an agreement signed in January 2026. The opening marked the bicentenary of the invention of photography and coincided with the fifth Nuit des Musées.