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(b Saïda, Algeria, 1953).

French painter, sculptor, photographer, film maker, writer and installation artist of Algerian birth. Born to Spanish parents, he was much affected by North African as well as Southern European culture. He trained at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Le Havre. Despite a pervasive and diverse use of media, Alberola often stressed the coexistence of his different artistic practices as leading to painting alone. His paintings relied heavily on evocative narratives, at once personal and ‘historical’. Alberola conceived of his role as a storyteller, on the model of African oral cultures. Convinced that narratives could not be renewed, he argued that a painter’s main task was to reactivate his work through contact with his pictorial heritage. The main points of reference for his paintings of the early 1980s were Velázquez, Manet or Matisse, whose works he quoted in a personal way. In the early 1980s he undertook a series of paintings inspired by mythological subjects, which he combined with his own history as the principal subject-matter of his work. The biblical story of Susannah and the Elders as well as the Greek myth of Actaeon provided his most enduring subjects, both referring to the act of looking as taboo, as in ...

(b Cairo, May 22, 1963).

American painter, sculptor, fibre and installation artist of Egyptian birth. Amer, one of the few young artists of African origin to gain prominence in the late 1990s international art scene, studied painting in France at the Villa Arson EPIAR, Nice (MFA, 1989), and the Institut des Hautes Etudes en Art Plastique, Paris (1991). She subsequently moved to New York. She is best known for her canvases in which paint and embroidery are combined to explore themes of love, desire, sexuality, and women’s identity in a patriarchal world. Amer’s use of Embroidery, historically regarded as a genteel female craft, to create images of women fulfilling their sexual desires without inhibition, recalls the provocations and strategies of 1970s Western feminist art. However, her work also reflects her alarm at the incremental curbing of women’s social and political freedoms in her native Egypt following the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, especially after the regime of Gamal Abdel Nasser ended in ...

Bazaar, which is rooted in Middle Persian wāzār and Armenian vačaṟ, has acquired three different meanings: the market as a whole, a market day, and the marketplace. The bazaar as a place is an assemblage of workshops and stores where various goods and services are offered.

Primitive forms of shops and trade centres existed in early civilizations in the Near East, such as Sialk, Tepe in Kashan, Çatal Hüyük, Jerico, and Susa. After the 4th millennium BC, the population grew and villages gradually joined together to shape new cities, resulting in trade even with the remote areas as well as the acceleration of the population in towns. The advancement of trade and accumulation of wealth necessitated the creation of trade centres. Trade, and consequently marketplaces, worked as the main driving force in connecting separate civilizations, while fostering a division of labour, the diffusion of technological innovations, methods of intercultural communication, political and economic management, and techniques of farming and industrial production....

Egyptian, 20th century, male.

Born 1919, in Cairo.

Painter (mixed media), collage artist.

Mounir Canaan began his artistic career in the early 1940s and moved into abstraction in 1946. Normally an oil on canvas painter, he also created assemblages of wooden pieces, and collages of printed documents which he arranged along geometrical lines. He showed work at several collective exhibitions in Cairo and at international events including the São Paulo Biennale (...

(b Meknès, Morocco, 1942).

Israeli painter and mixed-media artist of Moroccan birth. He emigrated to Israel in 1949 and studied art at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem (graduating in 1971) and the Central School of Art in London before receiving a BA degree in Social Science and History of Art at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem (1973). His mixed-media works of the 1970s conveyed his sense of physical dislocation at being estranged as a Moroccan refugee in Israel; the human figure appeared as an essential element of this theme of displacement and homelessness. In 1975 he returned to drawing and painting in works such as Analogical Work on Computers (1977; Tel Aviv Mus. A.), in which faceless, generalized figures function as symbols in a non-specific space. From 1975 to 1977 Cohen Gan lived in New York, where he studied at Columbia University (MFA, 1977), before settling in Tel Aviv, where he combined scientific systems with introspective autobiographical references in narrative paintings such as the series ...

Tunisian, 20th century, female.

Active in France from 1954.

Born 5 September 1930, in Ferryville.

Painter (mixed media/gouache), collage artist. Stage sets, designs for tapestries.

Lily Designe lives and works in France, where she married. She uses a variety of techniques occasionally based on collage, with frequent references to the supernatural aspects of the theatre. She tends more towards the magical than the fantastic....

Egyptian, 20th – 21st century, male.

Active in Italy.

Born 1957, in Cairo.

Painter, installation artist. Figures, portraits, animals.

Fathi Hassan was born in Nubia and first worked as an actor and a scenographer. In 1984, he obtained a diploma at the school of art in Naples. He has lived and worked in Italy since ...

Tunisian, 20th century, male.

Born in Mahdia.

Painter (mixed media).

Brahim Kamel has taken part in several group exhibitions. These include, among others, exhibitions in Tunisia and Egypt from 1971 onwards, at the International City of Arts in Paris in 1975, at the Salon d'Automne in Paris in ...

Tunisian, 20th – 21st century, male.

Born 6 March 1949, in Sfax.

Painter (mixed media). Figure compositions, figures.

Adel Megdiche graduated from the school of fine arts in Tunis in 1974. He taught art in secondary schools from 1974 to 1980, then went on to teach fine arts in Rabat (...

(b Khemis Miliana, 1948).

Algerian painter, installation artist and poet, active in England. She studied art and music in Algeria and at the Camden Art Centre and Croydon College of Art, both London, after moving to England in 1979. Her politics were informed by the Algerian war for independence and her experiences in Europe. Her work, exhibited in the USA and Europe, addresses European artistic treatments of African peoples, for example the Orientalist paintings of Delacroix and French colonial postcards; she reworked Delacroix’s figures, for instance, presenting a different reading of the female body. In an effort to engage her audience fully, she has produced multi-media and multi-sensory works. Her installations included video, sound recordings and photographs, and she often recited poetry and sang traditional songs at her exhibitions. Her paintings present layers of bright colours, with the darkest, top layer often scraped off to reveal those beneath. This scratching creates vital, dynamic lines that produce powerful effects on the viewer. She combines the visual traditions of West Africa, Algeria, Egypt and Europe in a critique of colonial and post-independence rule; her subject-matter also included representations of women and their treatment....

Susan Kart

Term that emerged in Francophone Africa in the early 1990s to define a series of contemporary art, artisanal, and craft practices in which artists laid claim to abandoned spaces and/or abandoned (found object) materials. Récupération does not translate well into English, but in a fine art context can loosely be explained as the retooling of materials and spaces from the natural and man-made environments to produce new objects and installations with cultural, political, and aesthetic implications.

One of the first documentarians of the movement was art historian Abdou Sylla. He positioned Senegalese artists who were practicing récupération (which he called ‘assemblage’ and ‘installation’) in opposition to the recycling operations by those he called ‘baay jagal’, a Wolof term for a person who collects trash to re-use or sell. Sylla’s distinction was necessary in order to situate the found object works of récupération artists in Africa against the craft practices of making shoes out of car tires, or toys out of soft-drink cans and electrical wire....

Egyptian, 20th century, male.

Born 1932, in Cairo.

Painter, collage artist, sculptor, potter.

Saleh Réda studied at the school of applied arts in Cairo, from which he graduated with a diploma in 1957, and then at the school of fine arts. He went to Czechoslovakia to study sculpture and ceramics, and obtained a doctorate in Great Britain. He has participated in collective exhibitions, such as the Biennial in Alexandria, the Biennale for engraving in Italy, the Venice Biennale, and ...

Tunisian, 20th century, male.

Active also active in France since 1970.

Born 31 December 1941, in Hammamet.

Painter (mixed media).

Abderrazak Sahli was a student at the school of fine arts in Tunis, then attended the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris in 1970 and ...

(b Paris, April 1, 1963).

French photographer, video artist, and installation artist of Algerian descent, active in the UK. Born in Paris in 1963, Zineb Sedira relocated to England in 1986. In 1995 she earned a BA in critical fine art practice with a focus on post-colonial studies at Central Saint Martins School of Art. She finished an MFA in Media at the Slade School of Art in 1997 and conducted research studies at the Royal College of Art until 2003. Through the use of self-portraiture, family narrative, and images of the Mediterranean, her work has addressed ethnic, religious, and gender identities as well as issues of stereotype, displacement, and migration. She draws on her Algerian heritage in much of her work, evoking North Africa through the integration of traditional Islamic forms and motifs into her installations. In her 1997 work Quatre générations de femmes, Sedira incorporated repeated images of her mother, daughter, and herself into traditional Islamic tile patterns (...

Egyptian, 20th century, male.

Born 1911, in Cairo.

Painter, collage artist, engraver.

Salah Taher was a student at the school of fine arts in Cairo, where he lives and works. He was president of the association of fine arts in 1960 and 1961, and became curator at the museum of modern art in Cairo, then its director. He has travelled in France, Italy, the former USSR and the USA....