Diasporic Imaginations in Algerian Art: From Aouchem to Zénati

Join us for a Wednesday Walkthrough – a gallery tour where artists, experts, researchers and academics give short talks in their field of expertise relating to the concepts explored in our exhibitions.

In Galleries 3 & 4 we are currently presenting the second-ever institutional exhibition of Algerian- German artist Hamid Zénati (b.1944, Algeria; d.2022, Germany) following his solo debut at Haus der Kunst, Munich. Celebrating Zénati's nearly sixty-year career, this major survey casts him as an inventive, free thinker and artist of his time.

This walkthrough will introduce the visual milieu of post-independence Algeria through a comparative lens on Zénati and the artist group Aouchem. Algeria's history under French occupation and subsequent political turmoil, including the War for Independence of the 1960s and The Civil War of the 1990s, forced many native artists to seek refuge in European cities, which, in turn, informed their artistic expressions.

Both Aouchem artists and Zénati employed motifs, signs, and colours derived from Amazigh and Algerian visual traditions in distinctive ways. Their oeuvre reflects a deep engagement with these elements, utilising them to express cultural identity and attachment to their homeland despite their displacement. This walkthrough invites participants to think about Zénati’s work in tandem with Aouchem’s use of symbols, situating both within the broader context of modern Algerian art and illustrating the mechanisms by which diasporic aesthetic languages are formed.