- Breast Cancer Awareness, 2023
- Breast Cancer Awareness, 2024
- Breast Cancer Awareness, 2025
- Breast Cancer Awareness, 2026
Project Summary:
The project highlights art and emerging technologies as powerful tools for health communication, capable of promoting education, prevention, and early diagnosis. Through a contemporary visual language, the artwork conveys a message of hope, empathy, and resilience, demonstrating how creative innovation can play a key role in disseminating critical health information.
In “Art for Health,” art transcends visual contemplation and becomes an emotional bridge, connecting audiences to the human reality behind breast cancer awareness. The piece invites viewers to engage in a meaningful journey where technology, emotion, and social impact intersect.
Rationale:
By combining physical art, motion graphics, interactivity and augmented reality, the project creates an immersive storytelling experience focused on digital health communication, emphasizing the importance of early detection, prevention, and community awareness.
Artistic Concept:
Through layered visual narratives, the artwork symbolically honors women affected by breast cancer, their families, and medical professionals. The piece transforms medical awareness into an emotional and immersive artistic experience, encouraging viewers to reflect on both the personal and societal dimensions of the disease. The visual language emphasizes empathy and connection, positioning art as a space for healing and dialogue.
Technical Description:
“Art for Health” integrates multiple digital and immersive technologies to create an interactive XR/AR experience.
The project combines:
- Printed digital illustration and mixed media collage as the primary visual storytelling medium.
- Motion graphics to introduce a dynamic visual narrative.
- Augmented Reality (AR) to expand the artwork into an immersive environment accessible through mobile devices.
- An interactive AR layers to connect audiences with artwork information.
User Experience and Audience Interaction: XR project. Multimedia installation.
This XR project enables a global experience, creating a hybrid space where physical and digital elements coexist to promote health awareness. The project is designed to be adaptable to different exhibition contexts, audiences, and environments, both physical and digital.
Structure: multilingual, inclusive, and structured in a didactic way.
An Ongoing Creative and Interdisciplinary Project.
Breast Cancer Awareness, 2023
Art and tech becomes a bridge connecting the audience to the emotional core of breast cancer awareness, making the artwork not just something to admire, but also a journey to embark upon.
‘Art for Health’ artwork combines digital illustration, motion graphics, interactivity and augmented reality to honour the strength and resilience of women and families affected by breast cancer. This is a project in continuous evolution and growth.
Breast Cancer Awareness | American Illustration Chosen Winner, 2024
“Art for Health” by Houda Bakkali was selected by a distinguished jury, a panel of art and design professionals from GQ, Entertainment Weekly, Los Angeles Times, Workman Publishing / Hachette Book Group, WIRED, The New York Times Sunday Business, The New Yorker, Disney+Hyperion, among other creative directors. The illustration was selected from among more than 8,000 participating entries.
“Art for Health” combines digital illustration, motion graphics and augmented reality. In this piece, the focus is placed on raising awareness about breast cancer, honouring women, families and doctors, while highlighting art and new technologies as powerful tools for disseminating health content.
The project also emphasizes how art and new technologies help to promote information, prevention and early diagnosis, while spreading a hopeful vision about the illness. In “Art for Health”, art and technology become a bridge connecting the audience to the emotional core of breast cancer awareness, transforming the artwork into not only something to admire, but also an immersive journey to embark upon.
Art for Health | Breast Cancer Awareness, 2025
On the occasion of Breast Cancer Awareness Month (2025), Houda Bakkali presents “Art for Health”, a work that pays tribute to all breast cancer patients, their families, and the specialists who address this pathology. A project in which the artwork comes to life through augmented reality not only to raise awareness through Bakkali’s creativity, but also to inform, demystify, encourage prevention and early diagnosis, and understand the true impact of new technologies on diagnosis and clinical treatment.
An innovative and dynamic concept in which the audience, by scanning the physical artwork, can view the augmented reality version, immersive, audiovisual, and interactive, which leads to informative content that is updated over time and invites the viewer to engage with the work. The exhibition will be shown simultaneously in different venues across different countries.
This exhibition exemplifies the power of the combination of art and new technologies to convey, through the creativity of artists, the best health-related content signed and endorsed by top specialists and documented by accredited sources. Measurable content that can be updated in real time, whose dynamic nature allows it to adapt to each piece of information while covering every detail, open to all spaces and all audiences. A didactic and communicative approach, as well as a way of raising awareness that goes beyond aesthetics, providing usefulness and sharing knowledge. Making responsible use of technology and merging art with the most human of sciences: Medicine. A science that, as indicated by Dr. Aureli Torné Baldé, Head of the Gynecologic Oncology Unit at Hospital Clínic de Barcelona, Associate Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Barcelona, and member of the Royal Academy of Medicine of Catalonia, has communication as a key element. Dr. Torné points out that
“communication plays a fundamental role in the approach to breast cancer, impacting multiple aspects. It is important to educate the public, and well-designed public health campaigns can increase awareness and motivate women to participate in screening programs or adopt healthier lifestyles. In addition, communication in the care of breast cancer patients is essential to ensure that they understand their disease, the diagnostic and treatment options, understanding the benefits and risks of each option and facilitating informed decision-making. Empathetic communication and psychological support are fundamental for patients and their families, as they help them manage the stress, fear, and uncertainty associated with the disease.“
Presented through an international network of cultural and educational venues:
The work “Art for Health” was exhibited at Centre Cívic Can Travi in Barcelona, Spain, and was simultaneously shown in different venues across several countries, including various Alliance Française locations, among them those in Auckland, New Zealand; Phuket, Thailand; Cuernavaca, Mexico; Valdivia, Chile; and Bogotá, Colombia, Piura and Trujillo, Perú, Cochabamba, Bolivia
The exhibitions are free to attend and have a clear educational focus, seeking to convey to the public the potential of digital tools in combination with digital and traditional artistic expression.
Breast Cancer Awareness | American Illustration Selected Winner, 2026
The work “Breast Cancer Awareness” by Houda Bakkali has been awarded the American Illustration 45 in New York, a competition that annually recognizes the best illustrations in the world and whose jury this edition has been made up of art directors from publications such as The New Yorker; The New York Times Magazine; Rolling Stone; Anthropologie; Axios; The Robb Report; Al Majalla; HarperCollins; Architectural Digest; The Marshall Project; New York Magazine and The Wall Street Journal.
The competition received 6,387 entries, of which 432 have been awarded and will be part of the annual AI-AP publication as well as the exhibition that will be held in New York next November.
Bakkali’s work “Breast Cancer Awareness” is part of this selection that brings together some of the best creatives in the world. A project based on illustration, but which also includes animated, immersive, and interactive versions, and which adds to her work on art, communication, and health, turning her illustration into an interface to promote awareness about breast cancer, to pay tribute to patients, families, and the medical community, as well as a space where creativity and technology come together for the dissemination of health and science.