Karima El Karmoudi

A graduate of the Villa Arson in 2020, Karima El Karmoudi explores a mode of transmission that is never self-evident, where stories, gestures, and images are continually transformed as they pass from one hand to another, from one language to another, or from one context to another.

Her practice operates at the intersection of family memory and a critique of the colonial imaginary. Magazine pages, slides, postcards, oral tales in Tamazight: she gathers fragments of reality and translates them into multiple plastic forms.

Since 2018, she has developed an ongoing collaboration with her parents, Fadma and Allal El Karmoudi, who have produced more than 1,500 drawings based on the stories they transmitted to her orally. This six-handed body of work, notably exhibited at Bétonsalon in 2021, questions the place of so-called popular or self-taught practices within institutional art spaces.

In her installations, the question of illusion intersects with that of memory. A wall of salt dough mimicking tadelakt, exotic photographs reinserted into the settings that produced them, family drawings reproduced as carpets using a tufting gun with the precision of a forger: each time, something is reversed. The authentic and the fabricated exchange places, and it becomes unclear who is producing the setting for whom.

Her work has been exhibited notably at Bétonsalon, Paris (2021), at the Villa Arson, Nice (2021), and presented as part of a residency at Triangle-Astérides, Marseille (2022).

Karima El Karmoudi lives and works between Nice and Paris.