Amal Abdenour

Biography

Amal Abdenour (1931-2020) was a Palestinian-French visual artist born in Nablus, who was exiled following the Nakba of 1948 and later settled in Val-de-Marne, France. In 1962 she moved to Paris, and in 1970 she discovered the photocopier, a discovery that became the foundation of her artistic practice for the following decades. Working with early Xerox machines as her primary tool, Abdenour built a body of work centered on fragmented self-portraits that layered and superimposed photocopied images of her own body and face, interrogating identity, exile, and self-representation through a medium that was, at the time, entirely new to art-making. This practice established her as one of the foundational figures of Copy Art and Body Art internationally, alongside artists such as Klaus Urbons, at a moment when reproduction technologies were just beginning to be explored as artistic media in their own right. Over time her work grew increasingly public and political, extending her early formal experiments with fragmentation and repetition into broader commentary on displacement and representation. Abdenour's work has been held and exhibited by institutions and archives including AWARE (Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions) and the Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha's Copy Art collection. Long under-recognized, her practice is increasingly being rediscovered as a major contribution to feminist and experimental art history, and is represented posthumously by the gallery lilia ben salah, which presented her work at Art Dubai Special Edition 2026 alongside Zoulikha Bouabdellah.