Art Dubai: Art Dubai Digital 2026

For Art Dubai Digital 2026, Galerie lilia ben salah brings together Amal Abdenour (1931–2020) and Zoulikha Bouabdellah (b. 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 different technological moments, from early electrographic processes to contemporary digital environments, become tools through which the body records displacement, experience, and political presence across time.

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. 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.

This presentation affirms the decisive role of Arab women artists in shaping experimental visual languages across generations, offering a perspective that is at once historical and urgently contemporary.