maya ines touam

AS PART OF THE LOUIS ROEDERER DISCOVERY AWARD

PRESENTED BY
FONDATION H, ANTANANARIVO, MADAGASCAR / PARIS, FRANCE & FONDATION BLACHÈRE, APT, FRANCE

MAYA INÈS TOUAM

REPLICA

4 JULY - 28 AUGUST 2022

10.00 AM - 07.30 PM

ACCESSIBLE

TICKETING

What creative spaces are available to a woman and daughter of Algerian immigrants, aware of her ancestry? This question incites Maya Inès Touam to study her forefathers, and perhaps also her peers. For Replica, the artist immerses herself in the œuvre of Henri Matisse (1869-1954), which she borrows from or “samples”—to cite musical practice—weaving in mentions of Africa, her “continent of origin”, and producing many impertinent homages. Ananas et Joujou (“Pineapple and Toy”, 2020) refers to Ananas et Anémones (“Pineapples and Anemones”, 1940), Icare, le Revenant (“Icarus, the Phantom”, 2020) echoes Icarus (1943-47), and L’Enfance, la Mer (“Childhood, the Sea”, 2020) calls up Polynésie, la Mer (“Polynesia, the Sea”, 1946). By placing creolization at the heart of her work, Touam creates a new visual vocabulary, as playful as it is scholarly, conceived as a rhizome at the intersection of several eras.

EXHIBITION CURATOR: TAOUS DAHMANI.

MAYA INÈS TOUAM

Born 1988 in Paris, France.
Lives and works in Paris, France.

Born to Algerian parents, Maya Inès Touam takes the viewpoint of a granddaughter of immigrants to build her work between the shores of the Mediterranean, putting an identity both intimate and foreign into play. A 2013 graduate of the École des Beaux-arts de Paris, her anthropological and dreamlike experiments are based on various media (photographs, drawings, sculptures, etc.) and personal or symbolic objects. In 2017, she won an award from the Fondation Alliances in Morocco. During a 2021 fellowship at the Fondation H in France, she extended her research to the country’sAfrican diaspora, offering a postcolonial look at immigration.