Publications
What does a people, made up of more than 1.2 billion souls living on a continent of more than 30 million square kilometres, have to say about itself? Africa is the repository of a collective memory, the receptacle of civilisations with moving boundaries whose gestures have crossed the centuries. What binds the populations of the African continent is the consciousness of living on the same territory, of belonging to the same history, and of facing the same challenges on the African soil: access to education and health; the respect of fundamental human rights; the right to free movement, self-determination and economic emancipation. Over time, this African consciousness has created a sense of belonging – sometimes tenuous – to the same land, the same people and the same destiny. Pan-Africanism, this collective ideal of political, social, economic and cultural emancipation, is the foundation of an unprecedented project.
Contents
Narratives of Womanhood
- Introduction: Is Writing the History of Women’s Art in Africa, Writing the Art that is Coming? Being African, Woman and an Artist Nadine Hounkpatin
- Conflicting Archives: Reimagining and Visualising Sociopolitical Narratives of Women Freedom Fighters in Zambia Gladys Kalichini
- An Aesthetic and Socio-Anthropological Analysis of Three Generations of Cameroonian Woman Artists Ruth Colette Afane Belinga
- Algerian Women Artists: Between History, Appropriation and Deconstruction of an Image Nadira Laggoune
- An Art of Proximity Rachida Triki
Institutional Narratives
- Introduction: Escaping the Vicious Circle Sonia Recasens
- Breaking Boundaries and Borders: Undoing Stereotypes with the Stereotypes (The Case of Contemporary Art from Africa) 3POINTS . . . (Dorothy Akpene Amenuke, Alice Korror Ebeheakey, Bernard Akoi-Jackson
- Modern Women: Archiving African Modernism Perrin Lathrop with Ndidi Dike
- Clara Etso Ugbodaga-Ngu and Miranda Burney-Nicol: Fragments of Trajectories of African Visual Artists Between Paris and London at the Time of Decolonisation Through the Lens of the Magazine Le Musée vivant. Amandine Nana
- One Museum under the Lens: The Smithsonian National Museum of African Art and the Representation of Women Making Art Karen E. Milbourne
Algerian Women Artists: Between History, Appropriation and Deconstruction of an Image
Nadira Laggoune
Abstract
After independence, from 1962 onwards, Algerian artists (Khadda, Issiakhem, Mesli, etc.) demanded that Algerian art be included in the universal mainstream. By reappropriating the age-old cultural heritage that existed in Algeria (including the arabesque, Arabic calligraphy and other traditional symbols and signs), they advocated merging it with the new aesthetics imported and assimilated in Europe to create a local modernity. However, in this elaboration of new languages, women are practically absent, their emergence in art being subject to the interplay of historical and social cultural factors that explain this state of affairs.
It was really in the 1960s that access to art schools became widespread, but women were rare, and their presence remained minimal until the beginning of the 1970s. It was with Baya (née Fatma Haddad), a pioneer, (followed by Souhila Belbahar, Leila Ferhat . . .) that their silent intrusion into the artistic field was affirmed, bringing to the emerging pictorial landscape a particular image of the woman that broke with academic orientalist models and clichés. They appropriated an image inspired by their daily life, their dreams, and gave a playful or dreamlike image of their environment, reinventing worlds and women, like so many universes where women live in harmony in a world that they invent for themselves.
