Born in Morocco, Malika moved to France in her teens and attended the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Montpelier. She then spent several years living in London and Los Angeles, recently dividing her time between Austria and Morocco. Malika is also a qualified personal trainer and holistic lifestyle coach, Kettlebell athlete and fully licensed skydiver and skydiving camerawoman. Malika has shown her work on four continents. She also did a Ted Talk in 2013 in Casablanca about one of her projects - Latitude 34.
Coming from a mixed culture background, she has lived in various countries without her family from an early age. This translated in her feeling like being in a position of the in between, at a fault line. She always felt at home and foreign at the same time in many places, a notion she learned to exploit as a photographer. Therefore the idea of home, culture, identity and place is for her a very fertile ground for investigation. However, as an artist she is driven by a propensity for optimism and hopefulness, her artworks speak volumes about this state of mind. She draws from a holistic personal view on the world, where she habitually detects and is interested in links between places, similarities between people, congruences in landscapes, common wisdom and shared mythologies rather than differences and boundaries.
Being physically engaged in her work, or what she calls a “boditude “ is important in her practice, a leitmotif albeit a very subtle one at times. It can come in the shape of tracing invisible lines around the globe, walking tracks in the wilderness or abstract ones during free fall. She is, in some way, a creative pilgrim where movement is to capture stillness and reframe the notion of time and space.
Amidst her latest works, Weeds or Flowers, the fruit of a 3 month residency in Switzerland, a series where she worked on the identity of the mountains and the toxic effect of tourism in that environment…
She also draws a line between the world below and above, but more importantly a circle to include the forgotten public. With the students at l’Esav “Superior School of Visual Arts” of Marrakech, and for the first time in Morocco, she did an exhibition conceptualised with a desire specific practical steps and even a special sensory dark room to stalk to all the senses and include those who can’t see, those who can’t hear and those with limited mobility.