Women on the Algerian Art Scene: Interrogating the Postcolonial Gaze through Documentary and Video Art

In her 2003 article entitled “Spécificités Algériennes,”¹ art critic and curator Nadira Laggoune-Aklouche noted the existence of an Algerian contemporary art scene, which she presented as characterized by various contradictions: the constant to-and-fro movement of artists between Africa and France not only fuelled cultural and artistic hybridity, but it also promoted the adoption of Eurocentric criteria when assessing Algerian artworks.² She has also argued that independence had awakened female consciousness, prompting more and more women to assert their artistic voice in public space. While the image of female artists practicing decorative art in the intimacy of their workshops still endures in collective memory,³ the advent of new media has altered their relation to producing art while widening the means of making art. Three editions of Mapping Subjectivity: Experimentation in Arab Cinema from the 1960s–Now, co-curated by Jytte Jensen and Rasha Salti at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA), demonstrated that the development of cinema and film culture in the Maghreb resulted from “the advent of digital technologies that very quickly democratized access to the materials and tools for making videos and films, to the extent that a parallel independent milieu could develop entirely at a grass roots level and organically.”⁴ Salti contends that “independent spaces of exhibition and screening sprouted in cities across the Arab world,”⁵ introducing diversity across the burgeoning art scene—including in Algeria.

Women have taken advantage of new art forms, which offer them the means to overcome the limitations of traditional artworks. Although Algerian artist Amina Zoubir is critical of the popularity of the Algerian art scene, she posits that digital technologies help rejuvenate artistic practices:

The relation of the public to video art is almost inexistent in Algeria. A certain nervousness when dealing with anything that might upset traditions reigns; in large part pictorial art remains linked to a classical iconographic representation where Orientalist painting and different expressions co-habit and dominate the local art scene. And yet, the insertion of videographic expression in the field of practical aesthetics can be recognized as a prolific element for refreshing the Algerian art scene, where video art is not distributed via regular structures, such as festivals and art galleries, which are either inexistent or inactive. Video art is surely characterized by communicative immediacy, revealed in a space-time that should be appreciated as an experimentation of our bodily sensations in real time, a communion transfigured by a body-video, privileged witness to the video aesthetic of Algerian artists.⁶

Zoubir depicts an art form that speaks to the body, which MoMA curator Salti qualifies as personal and experimental, self-consciously using the concept of “auteur cinema” in reference to Western canons and categories of genres.⁷

These emerging video experimentations reflect a trend that has developed across the arts. As a hybrid of cinema, video, and performance, art documentaries inscribe political agendas in renewed transversal art forms.⁸ Straddling the experimental and documentary modes, these short videos interweave fact and fiction by mixing professional and amateur actors. Mise-en-scène and installation designs express the engagement of visual artists with the documentary genre as an experimental tradition, using performance in space and time to document the world. Art documentaries are hybridized forms that convey the impact of digital technologies on an array of filmmaking practices, ranging from video art to visual art performance to documentary cinema.⁹ Art documentaries thus borrow from distinct artistic traditions, using the camera as a means of capturing images of the world following the documentary approach, exploring the techniques of montage and installation set-ups in reference to experimental arts practices and making use of the inherent link between video and performance to produce original art forms. Although the phrase “experimental documentary” may sound like an oxymoron when defined through the history of documentary or that of experimental cinema, it interestingly underlines the power of video experimentations to challenge the conventions and the forms of the other mediums.¹⁰ Introducing...