Productive Contexts and Contemporary Restraints: The Practice of Contemporary Art in Algeria Today
Productive Contexts and Contemporary Restraints: The Practice of Contemporary Art in Algeria Today
Alice Planel. In Ibraaz, 2 May 2012.
In this essay for Ibraaz, writer and critic Alice Planel explores the conditions of artistic production in Algiers, a city still affected by the legacy of a devastating civil war in the 1990s. Taking the third FIAC Algiers (2011) as her starting point, Planel references some of the key players promoting, discussing and exhibiting contemporary art in the Maghreb and talks to Algerian artists including Amina Menia and Atef Berredjem about how they develop their practices and negotiate the many difficulties inherent in getting their work produced and displayed. In doing so, Planel reiterates the need for scholarship on the subject of contemporary art in Algeria and across the Maghreb, and explores some of the tensions arising therein between the traditional and the contemporary. Due to discriminatory uses of the word 'modernity', she argues, it is also the very taxonomy and history of modern art that inhibits analyses of modern or contemporary Algerian art.
