Project Room: Algeria

Standing in front of the image

With the support of Menart Friends, la ville de Paris, l’institut Français d’Algérie and la saison Méditerrannée 2026

Exhibition: Foued Bouatba, Naim Boukir, Rima Djahnine, Mounir Gouri, Serine Hamami, Abdelmohcene Hamel, Houssem Harrak, Rima Rezaiguia, Hakim Rezaoui, Achraf Saadi, Fella Tamzali, Sofiane Zouggar

The audience is the recipient of the works. In front of each one, in the silence of its truth.
Standing in front of the image, we might borrow Assia Djebar’s words on discovering Baya: For a long time, when faced with any painting, I could not truly stand before it, I felt held back by an irreparable zone of shadow. The idea is to bridge this zone of shadow, that of the artist and that of the viewer. Here, this speaks to the making of the exhibited works. All were created by emerging artists living and working in Algeria, though some have since left the country. These are artists residing in the same place, a fact of no small significance, often following the still-visible footsteps of their predecessors; some also returned. The place, Les Ateliers Sauvages, is an independent art center in the heart of Algiers.

Where is home? Where do we belong? Where is the place where we are truly ourselves, at home? For the duration of a residency, the Ateliers became this dwelling place for artists seeking a workspace, and so much more. For them, the path to art has been, and remains, a long journey fraught with pitfalls, if not battles, through colonial and post-colonial history, collective and family memory, fratricidal war, and the quest for freedom. All with solitude as a constant companion.

It all began in the first decade of the 2000s. The artists exhibited here had spent their teenage years during the dark days of the civil war, the 1990s, a period followed by a surge in departures, clandestine or otherwise. Moving from one work to the other reveals a map of the “perceptible”, a landscape of lived experience, capturing an era, or at least a moment in time and a specific generation. The diversity of the pieces, in terms of both subject matter and style, sheds light on the conditions of their creation, first of all the creative freedom regarding choice of subject and mode of expression.

Only one rule was set for them: sharing their experience through studio visits and a presentation of the works created. Putting the viewer in the artistic loop responds a political concern, sharing of the “sensible”, by committing the spectator (though the term “monstration”* may be confusing in this context). For the artists, these public presentations offered a way out of the “internal exile” that is often the lot of artists and intellectuals alike. Questions such as “Where is home?” or “Where do I belong?” arise even within one’s own country, family, or village.

The exhibited works form the narrative of this story.

The works by Fouad Bouatba, Naïm Boukir, Rima Djahnine, Sérine Hamami, Abdelmohcene Hamel, Houssem Harrak, Mounir Gouri, Rima Rezaguia, Hakim Rezaoui, Achraf Saadi, and Fella Tamzali tell us about our world, much as they speak of themselves and of the artists. Each individual’s aesthetic experience is rooted in a political, social, and historical context, extending all the way to Gaza. Nor is beauty forgotten, that fusion of talent and thought described by Etel Adnan: a fusion that occurs when beauty, the implicit talent of a painting, rises to the level of the idea that animates it. Their images place us within a shared, lived representation, transcending the porous boundary between the inner and the outer worlds. The war of the 1990s had undermined the concept of the collective, credo of previous generations, yet a return is now taking shape along a different path. Along the path of art.

Wassyla Tamzali

Founding Director
Les Ateliers Sauvages