Alger, archipel des libertés

Pan-African Headquarters, which became “the Mecca of the Revolutionaries” (Amilcar Cabral) during the 1960s and 1970s, Algiers embodies in many ways the memory of the African emancipation movements that marked the second half of the 20th century. If the city and the whole country plunged into a dark period from the 1990s, it is as a subversive power that it resurfaces today on the international scene and reconnects with its protesting past: since February 2019, Algiers is the scene of a spontaneous revolt carried out mainly by the Algerian youth descended en masse in the streets to demand change. In this exhibition, the Algerian capital is convened as a background of memory of the imaginary and the awareness of the peoples of Africa by bringing together Algerian and African artists whose works manifest, fifty years after the Pan-African festival of Algiers, a new thirst for freedom.

Curators : Abdelkader Damani (Director of the Frac Centre-Val de Loire, Algeria/France) and Nadira Laggoune (Algeria)

For more information, visit the Frac Centre-Val de Loire website.

 

Participants :

Sunday Jack Akpan (Nigeria), Marwa Arsanios (Lebanon), Louisa Babari (Algeria/Russia), Fatima Chafaa (Algeria), François-Xavier Gbré (Ivory Coast), Caroline Gueye (France/Togo/Senegal), Collectif Archives de luttes des femmes algériennes, William Kentridge (South Africa), Leïla Saadna (Algeria), Lydia Saïdi (Algeria), Michèle Magema (Democratic Republic of Congo), Fatima Mazmouz (Maroc), Drifa Mezenner (Algeria), Mohamed Rachdi (Maroc), Sadek Rahim (Algeria), Zineb Sedira (France/Algeria), Massinissa Selmani (Algeria), Sofiane Zouggar (Algeria)

 

About Nadira Laggoune (Algeria) : 

Nadira Lagounne is an exhibition curator and art critic. Graduated in Law and holder of a master’s degree in audiovisual criticism and art theory, researcher/ doctoral student in art, she is assistant teacher at the Ecole Supérieure des Beaux-arts d'Alger since 1986. She teaches the history of contemporary images. She also taught critical mastery and aesthetics at the Institut Supérieur d'art dramatique and the Institut Supérieur de musique d'Alger from 1995 to 2000. She is a member of several visual arts juries in Algeria and abroad and author of numerous writings on contemporary Algerian art, particularly on the place of women. Among the many exhibitions she has organized are the International Festival of Contemporary Art, in 2009 and 2011, Dak'Art -the 10th Biennale of African Contemporary Art of Dakar in 2012, and the 16th Biennale of Young Creators of Europe and the Mediterranean, in 2013 in Italy. She has been director of the Musée d'art moderne et contemporain, le Mama, in Algiers since 2017.

 

About Frac Centre-Val de Loire :

Internationally recognized, the collection of the Frac Centre-Val de Loire offers an unprecedented crossing of artistic, architectural and urban experiments, rivalling the largest collections in the world (Centre Pompidou-MNAM in Paris; MoMA in New York; CCA in Montreal; DAM-Museum of Architecture in Frankfurt). However, it is the only one to propose an international mapping of architectural research and its relationship to artistic creation since the 1950s. The synthesis of the arts, radical architecture, deconstruction and research into digital technologies are the landmarks around which the collection was built. Although radical movements and experimentation were strongly represented, the collection remained marked by a European and North American geohistory. Since 2015, the artistic project has had the prospect of opening the collection to new geohistories of art (Africa, Arab worlds, Latin America), and to make disciplinary migrations a principle articulating all actions.