ANTANANARIVO
JUNE 1 - AUGUST 23
Dalila Dalléas Bouzar, French-Algerian artist, has been invited to Antananarivo by Fondation H for a research and creative residency as part of the exhibition Memoria: récits d’une autre Histoire [Memoria: accounts of another History] from June 1 to August 23,2024.
As part of Memoria: récits d’une autre Histoire [Memoria: accounts of another History], Dalila Dalléas Bouzar presents four paintings, including a series of three portraits entitled Blood and a portrait entitled My life is a miracle #2. Dalila Dalléas Bouzar's focus on the body and face expresses her desire to consider portraiture as a means of exploring identity and criticizing relationships of domination, whether patriarchal or colonial. Dalila Dalléas Bouzar is particularly sensitive to the violence inflicted on bodies, and sees painting as a way of preserving, regenerating or reinventing their integrity.
For her residency at Fondation H, Dalila Dalléas Bouzar is particularly interested in Lamba, a traditional Malagasy fabric. This fabric echoes Algerian traditions, where women wear Haïk, woven in white or gold, and men wear Burnous, woven in wool. Lamba and Haïk interest the artist in their capacity to create opacity, to be a form of resistance: these fabrics have different meanings in Madagascar and Algeria, but what they have in common is that they cover the body, symbolize dignity and establish a relationship between the self and the world.
Dalila Dalléas Bouzar, with her dual culture, approaches the image, the object and the sacred from a different angle, considering the cultural differences she creates and the dominance of western representations in art history. Identifying herself above all with African women and their traditions, the artist draws from Algerian memory the forms of a history of violence to which her works respond. From the image to the body, between the forces of the cosmos and the powers of the spirit, Dalila Dalléas Bouzar sheds light on these wounded identities and pays tribute to their strength and resilience.
BIOGRAPHY OF DALILA DALLEAS BOUZAR
Dalila Dalléas Bouzar was born in 1974 in Oran, Algeria. A lifelong draftswoman, she first trained in biology before discovering painting at a workshop in Berlin. A constant challenge for her, she enrolled at the Paris Beaux-arts to perfect this practice, which became her preferred medium. Her figurative style, at the crossroads of realism and onirism, rejects the authority of overly clean drawing in favor of limitless experimentation with color and contrasting light. From the political to the historical, from the biological to the psychological, her work questions the powers of pictorial representation on several levels, against any expressionist or illustrative tendency.