The photographer gradually immerses herself, series after series, in a game of association and deconstruction between cultures: Western, Eastern, and Pan-African. No one knows the destination of the image or its origin. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter, as long as it provokes questioning.
– Anne Bourrassé
Maya Inès Touam is a Franco-Algerian visual artist and photographer, born in 1988 in Paris. A graduate of the Beaux-Arts de Paris, she lives and works between Paris and Aubervilliers.
Her work plays with association and deconstruction across cultures—Western, Eastern, and Pan-African—rooted in her Mediterranean family heritage. She questions both the destination and the provenance of images through a practice of decentering. Through displacement and lineage, she reconfigures a terrestrial, historical, and memory-laden compass with her photography, combining still life with living species and questions alike.
In her photographic tableaux, Maya Inès Touam gathers hundreds, sometimes thousands, of studio shots and, through juxtaposition, composes new hybrid narratives that pay homage to, and reference, her origins and art history. Drawing on historical pictorial movements, she traverses time and color frequencies to create staged compositions that stretch inherited societal tensions from the past, mobilized in the contemporary context—heritage translocation, colonialism, creolization. Her images extract from reality the poetry of tales under tension.
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. It has also been shown in international festivals, including the Rencontres de la Photographie in Arles, the Tasweer Photo Festival in Doha, and the Lagos Photo Festival. She also develops pedagogical activities and participates in research and production residencies in Senegal, Benin, and Marrakech.