In the Blink of an Eye (Le temps d'un battement de cil)

MACAAL opens its autumn season with In the Blink of an Eye (Le temps d'un battement de cil), a solo exhibition by the Moroccan photographer and filmmaker Daoud Aoulad-Syad. The show runs from 18 September to 29 November 2026 in the museum's Artist Room in Marrakech.

The exhibition was conceived by MACAAL and first presented this summer at the Galerie Delacroix in Tangier as part of the first edition of the Photo Tanger festival, produced with the Fondation de l'Institut français du Maroc and shown there from 18 June to 31 August. It now comes home to Marrakech, the city where the artist was born and grew up.

Aoulad-Syad is best known for his black-and-white photographs of Moroccan street life, travelling performers and popular culture. Here the focus shifts to his rarer colour work, with a selection that extends his long exploration of everyday Morocco and that, in Tangier, included images of Marrakech taken in 1981 and never shown before. Coverage of the Tangier show described a scenography built to evoke "the movement and cadence of the street".

The artist speaks of the project as an act of memory. "The Marrakech I knew, the one I grew up in and which shaped my eye, no longer exists today," he told Le360 at the Tangier opening. A former physics lecturer, he recalls being struck in France by the care given to heritage, and resolving to devote much of his life to preserving Moroccan memory through photography and film.

The exhibition sits within a strong year for Moroccan photography, and gives Marrakech audiences a rare view of an artist who has moved between cinema and the still image for four decades, from the portraits shown at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris to features such as Adieu forain and Waiting for Pasolini.