Zoulikha Bouabdellah Moscow, b. 1977

Zoulikha Bouabdellah (born in 1977 in Moscow) is a Franco-Algerian multidisciplinary artist who lives and works between Casablanca and Paris. Raised in Algiers, she moved to France in 1993 during the Algerian civil war and graduated from the École nationale supérieure d’arts de Cergy-Pontoise in 2002. Her work spans video, installation, drawing, sculpture, and photography, and is known for its sharp, poetic examination of cultural identity, gender, religion, and globalization.

 

Since her early breakthrough with the video Dansons (2003), in which she performs a belly dance to the French national anthem La Marseillaise, Bouabdellah has explored the tensions between belonging and otherness, intimacy and politics. Through a language of irony, sensuality, and repetition, she engages with symbols drawn from both Islamic and Western iconographies — prayer rugs, ornamental motifs, erotic imagery, or nationalist hymns — which she reworks to question dominant narratives and cultural binaries.

 

Her practice often employs layering and juxtaposition: traditional materials meet contemporary forms, and the body becomes a site of both resistance and celebration. By recontextualizing familiar objects, Bouabdellah invites viewers to rethink how identities are constructed and how meaning circulates across cultures.

Her work has been exhibited widely in major institutions around the world, including the Centre Pompidou (Paris), Mori Art Museum (Tokyo), Brooklyn Museum (New York), Menil Collection (Houston), MUMOK (Vienna), and the Institut du Monde Arabe (Paris). She has participated in major international biennials, such as the Venice Biennale, the Bamako Encounters, and the Thessaloniki Biennale.

 

Recent solo exhibitions at the gallery include Let’s Dance! (2024), Turning a New Leaf (2023), and the duo exhibition Zoulikha Bouabdellah × Mahi Binebine (2025), which explored the body and the sacred through intertwined mythologies.

Her works are part of numerous public and private collections, including the Centre Pompidou, the Fonds d’art contemporain – Paris Collections, the CNAP, Mathaf – Arab Museum of Modern Art, the Barjeel Art Foundation, the Misk Art Institute, and several major European and international institutions.

 

Zoulikha Bouabdellah creates a visual territory where the personal meets the political, where ornament becomes language, and where the body, particularly the female body, asserts its power as a vector of emancipation and meaning.