Artist: Zoulikha Bouabdellah

Video and installation artist Zoulikha Bouabdellah resists hierarchies of personal and cultural identity. Cosmopolitan in her sense of self and in the practice of her art, she seeks to go beyond set boundaries - of time and place, culture, politics, and aesthetics to provoke enlightened dialogues. As Siobhán Shilton observes, “transcultural” art - the type of art that seeks to achieve what Bouabdellah envisions - is meant neither to unify nor construct a hierarchy between cultures.

Rather, Bouabdellah's work “renegotiates the relationship between cultures” in ways that inform and instruct. Working in a broad range of media - from video, installation, and performance to painting, drawing, and photography - Bouabdellah explores issues of national, transnational, and postcolonial identity, cultural dislocation, Arab cultural identity, the identity of Arab women, as well as more universal themes of gender and religion.

Zoulikha Bouabdellah was born in Moscow in 1977, but she remained there for less than a month. Her Algerian parents were in the Soviet Union as graduate students - her father in documentary film, her mother in the history of art; they had just completed their studies. Bouabdellah spent her youth in Algiers, constantly exposed to art. She was frequently in the company of artists and spent much of her time at the Musée National des Beaux-Arts d'Alger, where her mother, Malika Dorbani Bouabdellah, was curator from 1977 to 1987 and then director until 1994.

Threatened by extremist fundamentalists who targeted Algeria's intellectual and journalistic community, Bouabdellah's family was forced to flee the country in 1994. They settled in Paris, where, in 1997, Bouabdellah enrolled at the École Nationale Supérieure d'Arts de Cergy-Paris. In 2002, she was awarded a Diplôme National Supérieur d'Expression Plastique. Her teachers included the French video and performance artist Orlan, best known for her project of self-transformation through a series of televised plastic surgeries, and video artist Michèle Waquant, whom Bouabdellah credits with being the first to affirm her work by encouraging her to exhibit publicly. The art of Bill Viola, whose poetic and philosophical works Bouabdellah first encountered in 1998, inspired her to choose video as her primary (but not exclusive) medium.

Her first international recognition came when she was invited, in 2002, to participate in the Biennial of Contemporary African Art in Dakar. In 2004, she was again represented at Dakar, and she was also invited to participate in Africa Remix: Contemporary Art of a Continent. This influential exhibition, the largest ever held of contemporary African art, travelled over the course of the next two years to cities including Düsseldorf, Paris, London, Tokyo, Stockholm, and Johannesburg. In 2007, her work was featured in the African Pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennale; her video Croisée - f - crossing (2005) (fig. 6), a work inspired by the artist's travels in Syria, appeared in the exhibition Airs de Paris at the Centre Georges Pompidou; and Dansons (2003) (fig. 7), her best known work, was included in Global Feminisms, a major exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. A humorous assertion of the hybrid nature of French-North African identity today, this five-minute video, inspired by Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People, shows the mid-section of a woman's body as she carefully drapes her hips in layers of blue, white, and red fabrics, the “tricolore” of the French flag. Once her ensemble is in place, she begins a belly dance to the beat of La Marseillaise, the French national anthem.

Bouabdellah has had solo shows in Europe, Africa, and North America. She participated in artist residency programs in 2005 in Cape Town, South Africa and, in 2008, in the United States at Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts. Continuing to secure an international reputation, in 2008, she took part in exhibitions in Algeria, Belgium, France, Italy, and the United States. Thus far in 2009, her works have been seen in the Canary Islands and Dubai among other locations.

Bouabdellah has also been the recipient of several distinguished art awards. Most recently, in addition to the Abraaj Capital Art Prize for her installation piece, Walk on the Sky. Pisces, she was the inaugural recipient of Le Meurice Prize for Contemporary Art (2008). For this competition, awarded to an emerging French artist, Bouabdellah proposed a Surrealist-inspired sculpture entitled Le baiser (fig. 8). Rendered in gold lacquer resin, it consists of two amorously entwined columns, one of the Doric order (masculine), the other of the Ionic (feminine). It follows other works dealing with themes of love and gender relations, such as the 2002 video Ecran (fig. 9) and the installation Chéri (fig. 10, 11) from 2007. Bouabdellah lives and works in Paris.

Curator: Carol Solomon

American-born art historian and curator Carol Solomon is currently Visiting Associate Professor of Art History at Haverford College, Haverford, Pennsylvania. From 2002-2008 she was Curator of European Art at the Mead Art Museum, Amherst College, Amherst, Massachusetts.

Exhibitions organized by Dr. Solomon include The Third Space: Cultural Identity Today (2008), A Room with a View: The Photography of Abelardo Morell (2007), The Empress Josephine: Art and Royal Identity (2005), The Pain of War (2004), The Myth and Madness of Ophelia (2001), and The Hanged Man: Cézanne and the Art of the Print (1999).

Dr. Solomon received her PhD in Art History from the University of Pittsburgh in 1987. She has worked in the Department of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and has taught at Amherst College, Amherst, Massachusetts; Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts; The University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Massachusetts; Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, Massachusetts; McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada; and the University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.