Presenting the 2026 Recanati-Kaplan Prize Laureate: Mounir Ayache
Specializing in digital media and video games, Mounir Ayache will undertake a two-month research and exploratory residency in the United States in the fall of 2026, between Los Angeles, the Bay Area, and Houston.
About the Prize:
The Recanati-Kaplan Prize promotes intercultural exchange between the Arab world, France, and the United States. Awarded annually, the Prize supports an artist, cultural practitioner, or researcher from the Arab world whose work engages with the fields of arts and ideas and requires an immersive research stay in the United States. By fostering encounters, research, and experimentation across borders, the Prize highlights exceptional artistic and intellectual profiles whose work contributes to renewing contemporary narratives and enriching intercultural dialogue.
The laureate is awarded a two-month Villa Albertine residency in the United States, along with a $15,000 grant to support research and production.
The 2026 Laureate: Mounir Ayache
Based between Marseille and Marrakech, Mounir Ayache is a Franco-Moroccan artist whose practice sits at the crossroads of digital art, video games, 3D scanning, and speculative fiction. Aligning himself with the emerging Arabfuturist movement, inspired by Afrofuturism, Mounir Ayache uses fiction as a tool to propose alternative futures in which Arab and North African narratives are central. His work has been extensively exhibited, notably at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris (2024), the Jeu de Paume in Paris (2025), and the Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon (2025).
During his Villa Albertine residency, Mounir Ayache will explore Western representations of the Arab world, focusing specifically on the American entertainment industry’s “myth engines,” films, television series, and video games that shape collective memory and historical imagination. He will pursue this project in three key areas: Los Angeles, the Bay Area, and Houston. At the core of this research is a desire to merge the narrative tools of the American entertainment ecosystem with oral traditions, family histories, desert cosmologies, and myths rooted in Morocco and the Maghreb, creating hybrid forms that challenge orientalist frameworks.
“Mounir Ayache’s work offers a powerful vision for the future of Arab representation in popular media and emerging technologies. By supporting his residency, we affirm the vital role of artists in reshaping collective imaginaries”, said Mohamed Bouabdallah, Cultural Counselor of France in the United States and Director of Villa Albertine.
This research will directly feed into several ongoing projects, most notably the video game Leon the African 2575. More broadly, the project seeks to move beyond the critique of orientalism to create “counter-programmed” narratives, in which North African stories, figures, and cosmologies occupy the center of the frame—actively shaping the futures they imagine.