For Dalila Dalléas Bouzar, “Painting starts with the body” (All quotations in this article come from an interview between artist and author that took place in July 2024). Be it her own or another’s, the body is the compass of her performances, (self) portraits and tapestries.
Born in Oran in 1974, D. Dalléas Bouzar grew up in Paris, where she encountered art history as recounted by the capital’s museums. In 1997 she abandoned her studies in biology to attend the Beaux-Arts de Paris. There, she began to develop a unique language, drawing on the classical teachings of painting and figuration in order to examine the power dynamics that play out across the history of representation.

Starting with oil paint, that pillar of the European tradition, the artist reworked classics of Christian (Saint-Georges, Atlantique noir, La Cène, 2018) and Orientalist (Les Femmes d’Alger, d’après Eugène Delacroix,2003-2022) iconography. She immersed herself in the works’ compositions, palettes and gestures as she integrated them into her own universe, experimenting with colour, light and the relation between figure and background, in acts of rewriting that puncture the flesh of the dominant historical narrative. “For me, it’s not a question of seeking legitimacy, but of constructing new representations, decompartmentalising art history, opening it up, liberating it.”

Throughout her career, she has paid attention to the liberating potential of figures such as Sorcières (2019) and Baigneuses (2010-2024), subjects that have long been the recipients of sexist clichés in the art historical canon. These canvases plunge the figures into dreamlike spaces, among astral geometries that ground figuration’s realist imperative in a cosmic imagination. This decompartmentalisation also appears in D. Dalléas Bouzar’s performance work. In 1999, in the Falkland Islands, she began staging performances, a friend and a camera her only audience. Then still a science student, these experiments would help her discover the potential of a political and metabolic relationship with the world, as opposed to the study of nature aimed at better extracting its resources. From this foundation emerged her idea of “painting as flesh, as interface with the world”. Body painting, sound, movement and a panoply of symbols converge to describe a practice of performance as ritual. Whether in the public space (Studio Dakar, Dak’ART OFF, Dakar, 2018, Le Sang des innocents, Paris, 2024), the museum space (Musée du Quai Branly in Paris, Musée des Civilisations Noires in Dakar) or in art galleries (Galerie Cécile Fakhoury in Paris), the artist expresses a desire to reactivate the political power of the body.

D. Dalléas Bouzar began to use embroidery in her work with ADAMA (2016), in which a golden thread retraces the life of a woman according to the rhythms of the patriarchal institution of marriage. In Vaisseau infini (Palais de Tokyo, 2023), embroidery, long associated with female labour, interacted with a historical poetics that goes back to the dawn of humanity. Created alongside embroiderers from Tlemcen, the installation transcribes cave paintings from the Tassili n’Ajjer site in southern Algeria. The anthropomorphic drawings of Neolithic ancestors invite us to decentre Algeria’s past from its colonial heritage. Thus the artist continues the reparative work of memory previously carried out in Algérie année 0 (2011) and Princesses(2015-2016), which mobilised archives from the Algerian War (1954-1962) to trace a history of resistance and non-compliance. The gesture, according to the artist, had to involve painting, which she identifies as one of the vital sources of Western power: “This power of the image”.

Dalléas Bouzar’s practice weaves the thread of narrative to stitch together and heal the wounds of history. The myriad historical, mythical and fantastical characters that inhabit her work have accompanied her to, among others, the Dakar Biennale, the Cairo Biennale, the Fondation H in Madagascar, SAFFCA in Johannesburg, and Berlin, where in 2013 she was selected for the Goldrausch Künstlerinnenprojekt.