Maya Ines Touam: Les Choses qui restant (The Things that Remain)

Maya Inès Touam takes all the liberties. And she doesn’t apologise for it.

With the exhibition “Les Choses qui restent” (The Things that Remain), the Franco-Algerian artist and photographer shares her fascination with the history of Western art and presents a narrative in her own image. Here, appropriation functions as a narrative strategy of a world in-between, much like those who share her experience of a life between two shores.

Trained to become an artist in France, Maya Inès Touam questions the value of inherited heritage and challenges its place in relation to the canon. What creative space is possible to shape for a female artist and a child of immigrants? To achieve this, Touam appropriates the techniques and practices of the 16th and 20th centuries, ranging from religious iconography to the colorful experiments of Fauvism, but she subverts the codes of the sacred in favor of the incredibly profane.