The “2 Lizards” videos have been “the most on-the-nose, accurate, what it feels like to be in New York City during this quarantine period” cultural product, said Rujeko Hockley, an assistant curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and one of the curators of the 2019 Whitney Biennial, which included Ms. Bennani. “They make me cry.”

Part of their effectiveness owes to how they’re rooted in actual circumstance but rendered with fancy and wit. In a moment when fact can be elusive, or harsh — what’s unassailable, and needs no translation, is feeling.

“Art and culture takes facts, events, historical truths, even subjective truths, and turns them into something that someone who’s never had that experience can connect to and access empathy,” Ms. Hockley said. “That’s something Meriem does so well in general.”

Ms. Bennani frequently uses animation in her work, which often focuses on women and young people in Morocco, and deploys the whimsy of animation to slyly address serious sociopolitical subjects. At last year’s Whitney Biennial, she offered a sculpture garden that contained a pair of videos grounded in documentary footage and amplified with animated flourishes: One video featured singing luxury homes, and the other was a quasi-reality show about teenagers at the French school in Rabat that Ms. Bennani attended. (She was one of eight artists who demanded their work be removed from the Biennial in protest of a Whitney board member with ties to a military supplies firm; the board member resigned before the work could be removed.)

Though she’s lived in the United States for a decade, Ms. Bennani thinks of “2 Lizards” as her first American film. “All of my projects take place in Morocco,” she said. “When you work in a new place, it’s charged with a new historical context, a new political context. It’s been really fun because I never did that before.”

Ms. Barki has directed several short films focused on music and youth culture, and worked as an editor and director of photography on projects for clients including Nike and Vogue. In the “2 Lizards” series, their aesthetics blend together — Ms. Bennani’s interweaving of video and animation matched with Ms. Barki’s editing, rhythm and pacing; Ms. Barki’s full immersion into the news with Ms. Bennani’s laissez faire reluctance.