Art Dubai: Art Dubai Digital 2026

For Art Dubai Digital 2026, Galerie lilia ben salah brings together Amal Abdenour (1931–2020) and Zoulikha Bouabdellah (1977) in an intergenerational dialogue that places Arab women artists at the intersection of technology, history, transmission, embodiment, and memory.

Rather than approaching the digital as rupture or spectacle, the presentation traces a lineage. It reveals how technological moments ranging from early electrographic processes to contemporary digital environments become tools through which the body records displacement, experience, and political presence across time.

Seen together, Abdenour and Bouabdellah do not stand in contrast but in succession. Their works mark two moments within the same history of image production, where technologies evolve while the fundamental questions of embodiment and memory persist.

Academically trained in the fine arts, Amal Abdenour moved from mural and fresco traditions toward experimental media, becoming a pioneer of electrography. Beginning in the late 1960s, she developed radical uses of the first photocopier in France, producing intimate corporeal imprints that fused abstraction with lived and diasporic histories. In her work, technology becomes an apparatus through which memory is fixed, transmitted, and made visible.

Working across video, installation, and photography, Zoulikha Bouabdellah extends this trajectory into digital media. Her practice unfolds through spatial and ornamental vocabularies, activating gesture, repetition, and participation. Bouabdellah does not succeed Abdenour chronologically; she reactivates the terrain that Abdenour opened, translating its urgencies into the conditions of the digital present. If Abdenour’s machine registered contact, Bouabdellah’s systems generate apparition. The body appears as both interface and witness, carrying history while continually reshaping it.

By placing these two artists in dialogue, Galerie lilia ben salah proposes a vision of digital art grounded in continuity. Technology emerges not as novelty, but as a medium through which memory persists, circulates, and becomes embodied again.

Across generations, technology changes, but the body remains the place where images become history.

About Amal Abdenour (1931–2020)

Amal Abdenour was a French-Palestinian artist whose life and practice unfolded between Cairo and Paris. Academically trained in the fine arts, she moved from mural and fresco traditions toward experimental image-making, becoming a pioneer of electrography. From the late 1960s onward, she developed radical uses of the first photocopier in France to produce corporeal imprints that fused abstraction with lived experience. Her work positions the body as a site of memory and transmission, where exile, history, and identity are inscribed through technological processes.

About Zoulikha Bouabdellah (b. 1977)

Born in Moscow and raised in Algiers, Zoulikha Bouabdellah works across video, installation, photography, and digital media. Her practice is profoundly spatial and sculptural, mobilizing ornament, script, and gesture to construct environments in which the body becomes both participant and measure.

As articulated by Professor Silvia Naef (University of Geneva), her work can be understood as “making images without making them,” approaching abstraction as a living language through which visual memory is produced, transmitted, and transformed. Through technological systems, the body emerges as an active archive, continuously rewriting history in the present.