Zoulikha Bouabdellah

Zoulikha Bouabdellah (born in 1977, Moscow, Russia, resides in Casablanca) grew up in Algiers and moved to France in 1993 where she obtained her diploma from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Arts de Cergy-Pontoise in 2002.

In the form of installations, videos or drawings, her works question icons, dominant representations, motifs and ornaments by confronting them with geopolitical dynamics and global issues related to conflicts, sexuality or the place of women. This deconstruction of the gaze takes place through a reflection that questions culture and creation, production and industrialization.

In 2003, she produced the video Dansons in which she confounded the archetypes of French and Algerian cultures by performing a belly dance to the melody of La Marseillaise, which was part of the Experimentation in the Arab Vanguard program at the Cinémathèque française (Paris, 2003).
She participates in the exhibition Africa Remix at the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris, 2005) and is selected for the Paradise Now! Essential French Avant-garde Cinema 1890-2008 at the Tate Modern (London, 2008).

Zoulikha Bouabdellah presented her work in a solo exhibition, INVERTED, at the Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno in Las Palmas Gran Canaria (Spain, 2016).
She has also presented her work at Wiels in the exhibition Body Talk (Brussels, 2015), at the Centre Pompidou in the exhibition Modernités Plurielles 1905-1970 (Paris, 2014), at the Museum für Moderne Kunst in the exhibition The Divine Comedy (Frankfurt, 2014).

Zoulikha Bouabdellah’s work has been recognized with numerous awards including the Abraaj Capital Art Prize (Dubai, 2009), the Prix Meurice pour l’Art Contemporain (Paris, 2008) and the Villa Médicis Hors les Murs (Cape Town, 2005).