Artist as Archivist: French Algerian Colonial History in Contemporary Art

Generations after Algeria gained its independence in 1962, the truth of French colonial violence and oppression remains largely obscured in French academia, political discourse, and public monuments. Artists Zineb Sedira, Katia Kameli, and dalila mahdjoub mine various archives to uncover stories of domination, survival, and revolution. For the publication accompanying her exhibition Dreams Have No Titles at the 2022 Venice Biennale, Sedira chose a newsprint format that reproduces anti-colonial imagery and records discovered in the course of her research. In Kameli’s video series, le Romain algérien (the Algerian novel) (2016-19), a street vendor, an academic, and a photojournalist present their collected postcards and photographs of France in Algeria, explaining how the images are gathered and interpreted. In her research, mahdjoub has rescued records found degrading in former government bureaus. In her works, she employs reproductions of these documents as well as applications, permits, and letters from her family’s archive to explore untold French/Algerian history. In these artists’ works, the archivist is a careful guardian of the historical record, as equally empowered to lock information away into dusty vaults as to bring it out into the open. The stories culled from these archives, otherwise in danger of being literally thrown upon the garbage heap of history, are reassembled in their art to serve as counternarrative to French denial and suppression. In their capacity both to make visible and validate the generational trauma of colonialism’s legacy, the creative processes that produced such works can be understood as practices of (self-)care.