Maya Inès Touam France, b. 1988

Halfway between photography and painting, between Africa and the West: this is where Maya Inès Touam's works are placed. 

Maya Inès Touam, a Franco-Algerian visual artist and photographer born in 1988 in Paris, lives and works between Paris and Aubervilliers.

 

A graduate of the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris, her work has been exhibited in numerous institutions, galleries, and foundations in France and internationally, and is included in public and private collections such as the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and Huis Marseille in Amsterdam.

 

Maya Inès Touam’s work is a game of association and deconstruction between cultures—Western, Eastern, Pan-African—rooted in her Mediterranean family heritage. She questions both the origin and the destination of images, practicing a form of displacement. Through movement and lineage, she reshapes, through her photography, a terrestrial, historical, and memorial compass, combining still life with living species and questions.

 

In both two- and three-dimensional works, the photographer weaves a dialogue between photographic techniques and tools in relation to their environment, from domestic objects to furniture. It is this attentiveness that defines her approach as a visual artist and photographer.

 

In her photographic tableaux, Maya Inès Touam assembles hundreds, sometimes thousands, of studio shots, and through juxtaposition, composes new hybrid narratives that pay homage to and reference her origins and the History of Art. She layers objects with beliefs, contrasts the popular with the sacred, and blends—like a child constructing or an adult deconstructing—languages with their uses. Drawing on historical pictorial movements, she traverses time and color frequencies to create scenes that extend societal misunderstandings inherited from the past and mobilized by the present—heritage translocation, colonialism, creolization.

 

Her images extract from reality the poetry of tales under tension.