Mounir Ayache: Recanati-Kaplan Prize
Institute of Art Lagos celebrates artist and researcher Mounir Ayache, recently named the 2026 laureate of the Recanati-Kaplan Prize. The award recognises Ayache’s significant contributions to contemporary digital art and supports an ambitious research residency exploring the relationship between entertainment, power, and historical imagination.
Working at the intersection of video games, 3D scanning, speculative fiction, and critical theory, Ayache has developed a practice that interrogates how Arab and North African identities are constructed, circulated, and often distorted within global visual culture. His work challenges the dominance of Western narratives in shaping collective memory, proposing alternative futures in which Arab perspectives are not peripheral but foundational.
Digital Media as a Site of Resistance
Ayache’s practice is grounded in a deep engagement with popular digital media; particularly, video games and virtual environments as political and cultural tools. Rather than treating these technologies as neutral or purely entertainment-driven, he approaches them as sites where ideology, mythology, and power are encoded. Through immersive digital worlds and speculative scenarios, Ayache exposes how histories are simplified, erased, or weaponised, while simultaneously opening space for reimagining them.
Central to his work is arabfuturism: not as an aesthetic trend, but as a methodological framework. By combining speculative fiction with archival research and digital fabrication, Ayache constructs worlds that operate both as critique and proposition thereby questioning inherited narratives while imagining new modes of belonging, agency, and futurity.
Research, Exhibitions, and Global Engagement
Ayache’s work has been presented across international exhibitions, festivals, and research platforms, where it has been recognised for its conceptual rigor and technological innovation. His practice bridges artistic production and scholarly inquiry, often unfolding through long-term research projects that blur the boundaries between artwork, archive, and critical essay.
Through this hybrid approach, Ayache contributes to wider conversations around postcolonial studies, digital sovereignty, and the politics of representation. His work resonates across disciplines, engaging artists, theorists, and technologists concerned with how emerging media reshapes cultural memory.
The Recanati-Kaplan Prize Residency
As the 2026 Recanati-Kaplan Prize laureate, Ayache will undertake a residency with Villa Albertine, travelling to Los Angeles, the Bay Area, and Houston. The residency focuses on examining the American entertainment industry; especially film, gaming, and digital storytelling, and its global influence on historical imagination and cultural myth-making.
This research builds directly on Ayache’s ongoing interest in how dominant entertainment systems construct simplified narratives of the Arab world, often reinforcing geopolitical hierarchies. By engaging these industries from within, Ayache seeks to understand their mechanisms while developing alternative models for storytelling rooted in Arab experiences and speculative futures.
A Practice Aligned with Global South Futures
Institute of Art Lagos recognises Ayache’s work as part of a broader movement of artists from the Global South who are reclaiming technology as a tool for self-definition rather than extraction. His practice resonates strongly within contemporary African and diasporic contexts, where artists increasingly optimize digital media to challenge inherited colonial narratives and imagine new futures based on their own terms.
We congratulate Mounir Ayache on this important recognition and look forward to the continued evolution of a practice that capitalize on the complexity, autonomy, and radical imagination embedded in the rise of digital art technology.
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