Zoulikha Bouabdellah

French-Algerian artist born in 1977 in Moscow, Zoulikha Bouabdellah grew up in Algiers until the civil war forced her to leave her country and come to settle in France with her family in 1993. Her work based on transgression, draws its inspiration from this plural identity. Through installations, videos or photographs and the notion of otherness, the works of Zoulikha Bouabdellah question our dominant political, social, moral, religious or even formal representations.

A Graduate in 2002 of the École Nationale Supérieure d’Arts of Cergy-Pontoise, Zoulikha Bouabdellah has rapidly made a name for herself on the international art scene. Her first videos such as Dansons (2003), instantly reveal an artistic stance that raises the question of duality or cultural co-education as a model yet to be defined.
This video piece, shown in numerous exhibitions throughout the world, mixes the prototypes of French and Algerian cultures through the modern and somehow unexpected scene of a woman doing a belly dance to the French national anthem, with blue, white and red scarves tied to her waist. Beyond separateness, proscriptions or unvoiced comments, the vision of the artist on the world transcends its borders in order to further merge them.

The work of Zoulikha Bouabdellah has received many awards including the Abraaj Capital Prize (2009) or the Meurice Prize for Contemporary art (2008). Her pieces enjoy a broad diffusion on the international artistic scene, from the Tate Modern in London to the Mori Museum in Tokyo via the Pompidou Center in Paris and the Venice or Bamako Biennials.