For THE HOLE Hicham Benohoud persuaded the inhabitants of houses in the medina of Marrakech to allow him to knock holes in their walls and floors. In his photographs, people and their body parts emerge from temporary holes.

In the digital era, where everything has become visually possible, where the borders between reality and the imaginary are increasingly porous, and where truth and falsehood have become entangled, Benohoud resists the temptation to retouch and re-arrange his photos. He wants his pictures to display events as they really happened. Benohoud’s photographs are both staged and documentary. They explain how the surreal can be embedded in everyday life and how little enactments of the absurd can tear holes in the fabric of ‘normalcy’ that usually keeps people’s creative ambitions under wrap. As it is typical of Benohoud’s work, any social criticism or sense of subversion is expressed with irony and feigned lightness.