Dalila Dalléas Bouzar

Une part de soi

June 12th > July 25th, 2020

Untitled #1, série Topographie des terrors, 2013, technique mixte sur papier, 70x100cm © Dalila Dalléas Bouzar

The exhibition Une part de soi presents a selection of drawings and paintings that take us to the roots of the thought of a committed visual artist. Dalila Dalléas Bouzar questions the status of the painter, the history of art and representation as a tool of power.

By appropriating and updating the technique of oil painting that it associates with other more contemporary mediums, Dalila Dalléas Bouzar wishes to position herself in an artistic lineage and claim the heritage of the history of art.

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Through painting and drawing, Dalila Dalléas Bouzar reinterprets archive images to address the individual and collective memory of traumatic events.

In the Topographie des Terrors series, she questions the relationship between architecture, interior spaces and terror as potential tools of violence based on free inspirations from the city of Berlin (drawings from life in the city, archive photographs ). Omnipresent in this place, memory draws the leitmotif of obsessions that haunt it for the spaces we inhabit.

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Studio Dakar (Maria), 2018, huile sur toile de lin, 30x40cm © Dalila Dalléas Bouzar

Dalila Dalléas Bouzar uses oil paint in performances through which she questions the status of the painter. In the Studio Paris and Studio Dakar series, the artist-visual artist redefines the exercise of the portrait, formerly reserved for people of power. During the Dakar Biennale in 2018, she portrayed inhabitants in the Senegalese streets thanks to a nomadic studio that she created and transposed to the AKAA (Also Known As Africa) fair in Paris, from November 9 to 11, 2018, to paint directly on the face of visitors each day for five hours. By combining this classic technique with performance, the artist imagines rituals to decompartmentalize the borders imposed by the history of art from which reductive classifications arise in order to imagine new creative spaces and temporalities.

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For Dalila Dalléas Bouzar, painting today means becoming aware of the power of representation. With reference to the painting Women of Algiers in their apartment (1834) by the French painter Eugène Delacroix, it is precisely Orientalism that she questions in Women of Algiers, after Delacroix to put into perspective this fantasized vision of the 'Orient in the light of our contemporary times.