Maya Inès Touam - Belongings

Between North and South

Maya Inès Touam grew up in Paris, where she graduated from the art academy. At the same time, she felt strongly linked to Algeria, the homeland of her father’s family and the country her maternal grandmother had left in 1953, on the eve of the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962). In her youth, people often spoke of European and North African cultures in dichotomies: black and white, good and evil, centre and periphery, the coloniser and the colonised. Touam resists such artificial polarities in her artistic practice. With a deep sense of history she interweaves stories, visual languages, and objects from different cultures in her digital collages.

Inspiration through forms, stories, myths and masterpieces

Maya Inès Touam presents her photographs on supports that carry their own histories: Christian altarpiece panels, Gothic ogival forms, reinterpreted stained glass, Almoravid architecture, Asian folding screens, and everyday objects such as serving trays. Each work is permeated by a network of references and layers of meaning.

The same is true of the photographs themselves. Some of the works are reinterpretations of handed-down stories, such as the myth of Icarus or a Senegalese folk tale. In many of the works, colour and composition can be traced back to aspects of Western art history, such as religious iconography, vanitas still lifes, and Fauvist colour experiments. Henri Matisse, in particular, is a clear source of inspiration: Touam makes still lifes based on his approach to composition and abstraction, or cites the compositions of individual works. In musical terms one could speak of an artist ‘sampling’ earlier works in order to create an entirely unique and contemporary sound; at the same time, citing masterpieces is an elegant way for a French-Algerian woman to enter the domain of dominant Western art history.