The Classroom by Hicham Benohoud

What does it mean to learn in silence? And what happens when the classroom becomes a stage, the body a symbol, and the ordinary charged with the weight of unseen forces?

In La salle de classe, Hicham Benohoud transforms his role as an art teacher into that of a silent conductor. Without props from outside, without choosing his student participants for appearance or emotion, he captures spontaneous tableaux born in the very heart of the classroom. There, amid fluorescent light and desk-bound routine, he constructs strange, dreamlike performances. His students become anonymous actors in a theater of constraint and invention—a place where lying on the ground or climbing on tables becomes a small act of creative rupture, even as they remain unaware of the image’s final meaning. These photos are not just compositions; they are quiet disruptions of the everyday, echoing with unspeakable tensions and questions.

Benohoud’s work weaves psychological landscapes from the barest materials—wire, tape, cardboard, cloth—building prisons of metaphor around faceless bodies. The photographs, often devoid of narrative or identity, depict a strange stillness. Under the heavy glow of a single suspended lamp—part UFO, part genie’s lamp—his images summon children not as portraits, but as presences suspended between being and becoming. There’s an eerie tension: we can’t tell whether we’re witnessing the teacher’s inner world or the distorted echoes of the students’ own suppressed selves. The more we look, the less we see—and the deeper we fall into that murky place between performance and truth.

Outside the classroom, his portraits continue—cut, layered, stained, and chemically altered—always silent, always suggesting an unspoken protest. Through staged neutrality and frozen expressions, Benohoud dissects the social, cultural, and political expectations that mold the individual. In photographs taken in Azemmour and Kinshasa, the space is unplaceable, the people anonymous, the poses neutral—just like ID photos. But the scene is charged. A twisted smile, a bent neck, a floating branch of thorns: these elements deform, compress, and wound. Through subtle violence, the works speak of submission, of silent trauma, of an inner scream muffled by decorum. These bodies do not resist—they endure. That is the haunting.

Benohoud does not explain. He does not offer answers. He constructs a language of suggestion, an art that does not shout but vibrates. His photographs resist—they are not to be consumed or easily decoded. And in that resistance lies their power. They are spaces for projection, for unease, for speculation. They do not conclude. They ask. They echo.

So then, if these children play in silence, if these shadows bear no names, how do we come to recognize ourselves in their stillness? Or perhaps more unsettling—what if we don’t?