Zoulikha Bouabdellah

Biography

Zoulikha Bouabdellah is a French-Algerian artist, born in Moscow in 1977 and raised in Algiers, who works across video, installation, sculpture, drawing, and photography. Her practice reinterprets and juxtaposes elements drawn from both Islamic and Western visual cultures, prayer rugs, ornamental pattern, zellige tilework, and nationalist symbols, to challenge inherited stereotypes and to open ambiguous spaces of resistance and negotiation around the representation of the female body. Her 2003 breakthrough video work Dansons entered the permanent collection of the Centre Pompidou, establishing her as a significant voice in contemporary art engaging questions of gender, culture, and identity across the Arab world and its diasporas. More recent bodies of work, including the exhibition Entre Zouleikha et Antiope, revisit marginalized female figures from mythology and religious narrative, such as Zouleikha, Antiope, and Venus, through drawings, collages, and vegetal forms that trace power's imprint on bodies, stories, and emotions. Bouabdellah has shown internationally across major institutions and biennials, and is represented by the gallery lilia ben salah, which presented her work at Art Dubai Special Edition 2026 alongside a historical pairing with Amal Abdenour, a presentation framed around continuity in the exploration of fragmentation, memory, and the body across generations of women artists.