Houda Bakkali is an award-winning visual creative. She is expert new technologies applied to art.
With a long career as a digital creative, in 2008 she published her first digital series called “Africa sweet and Pop”. In 2018 the “Beautiful African Woman” projected her onto the international scene, winning prestigious awards such as The New Talent Award at the Festival International Artistes du Monde in Cannes, festival sponsored by the City Hall of Cannes.
Her art has been exhibited in solo exhibitions at the Madrid International Airport and Málaga-Costa del Sol International Airport, these exhibitions were the first ever events that merged physical art, augmented reality and immersive experiences in these airports with the female figure as the protagonist. Her art was exhibited worldwide in public and private exhibitions. In 2020 she presented a canvas with augmented reality in Monte-Carlo, and a canvas with an immersive version in Sanremo, Italy. She has also developed a global and pioneering project on digital art, augmented reality and new technologies in 6 Civic Centers of Barcelona City Council with Arab Women as the protagonist. Likewise, she has developed the first Web3, educational, virtual and multimedia project on Don Quixote, the most universal literary book. Houda Bakkali is pioneer in digital art and application of new technologies to art, for years she has shared her work through iconic public and private institutions, as well as, art fairs, informative workshops and conferences, etc.
Houda has been honored with awards from the American Illustration (New York), International Motion Award (New York), the New Talent Award at the International Festival Artists of the World in Cannes, London International Creative, Paris Design Award, Creative Quarterly (New York), and for four times the Graphis Silver Award (New York), among others distinctions. Likewise, she among the first in the world to be selected for an NFT drop by the iconic TIME magazine for its first web3-NFT initiative. Her colorful works are created by combining digital illustration and mixed technique as well as motion graphics and augmented reality.
Her art has been exhibited worldwide and her techniques and creative process have been recognized by different international magazines, institutions and iconic spaces including the Palazzo Bellevue, the Museum of Flowers in Sanremo, the City Council of Sanremo (Italy), the emblematic Casinó di Sanremo (Italy), The City Council of Madrid, Cultural Centers of the City Council of Barcelona, Paradores Nacionales (Spain), House of Castilla la Mancha in Madrid, Illustrious College of Physicians of Málaga, Adolfo Suárez Madrid-Barajas Airport, Málaga-Costa del Sol Airport, etc. Her art has been exhibited at international art fairs as well as private events in Biarritz, Paris, Geneva, New York, Monaco, Barcelona, Madrid, etc.
From her studio La Bonita Digital, she works for different companies and institutions, managing different projects, both visual communications & marketing, as well as multimedia & interactive projects, edTech, digitalization, workshops on new technologies.
FEATURED | PRESS | AWARDS
REVIEW BY JULIET ART MAGAZINE | ITALY, 2020
The style of Houda Bakkali is unmistakable and derives from a sophisticated and often ironic mimesis of the popular contents of the urban environment, reworked through a lively chromatic pop range and an elegant and essential design. The artist seems to consider the urban scene as a festive visual spectacle in which the images imply a multiplicity of messages, of logical, emotional and symbolic meanings: metropolitan details coming from different cultures flow into her works, unexpectedly merging into a new balance without generating conflicts. If the 60s Pop Art turned its investigation to the complex and multiform panorama of the great western metropolises with the intent to carry out an irreverent reconnaissance of mass culture, Houda Bakkali widens the field of investigation to a sort of extended macro continent that reflects in a more updated way the new integrated topography of the world, increasingly founded on inevitable mutual implications.
Her language shares with the “historical” Pop Art the intent to arouse in the viewer an immediate response and the awareness that the multi-faceted cultural horizon in which we find ourselves living is a reality that cannot be evaded or denied, but must be investigated and understood in its formative factors and in the interconnections that animate its dynamics. In recent decades, society has profoundly changed: well-being, which for some time seemed to be within everyone’s reach, has revealed its prevaricating background against the environment and the populations where mass production has been displaced. Values have changed, today increasingly in tension between the two opposite poles of ideology and total dissolution, the vision of the world has changed, which oscillates vertiginously between bewilderment and a childish individualistic narcissism. In such a heterogeneous context it is very easy to lose orientation and not be able to find a coherent and not partial reading key to the world around us.