Exhibition 'Maya-Inés Touam' in Huis Marseille, Museum for Photography
From 24 October 2026 until 7 February 2027 Huis Marseille will be showing Belongings (Ce qui nous appartient), the first solo exhibition in the Netherlands by the French-Algerian artist Maya Inès Touam. In recent years Touam has created remarkable, visually striking tableaus in which elements from different times, cultures, art movements and religions come together in a finely balanced way. Her compositions address contemporary themes that are close to the artist’s heart, allowing myths and masterpieces to find echoes in the present.
Between North and South
Maya Inès Touam grew up in Paris, where she graduated from the art academy. At the same time, she felt strongly linked to Algeria, the homeland of her father’s family and the country her maternal grandmother had left in 1953, on the eve of the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962). In her youth, people often spoke of European and North African cultures in dichotomies: black and white, good and evil, centre and periphery, the coloniser and the colonised. Touam resists such artificial polarities in her artistic practice. With a deep sense of history she interweaves stories, visual languages, and objects from different cultures in her digital collages.
Inspiration through forms, stories, myths and masterpieces
Maya Inès Touam presents her photographs on supports that carry their own histories: Christian altarpiece panels, Gothic ogival forms, reinterpreted stained glass, Almoravid architecture, Asian folding screens, and everyday objects such as serving trays. Each work is permeated by a network of references and layers of meaning.
The same is true of the photographs themselves. Some of the works are reinterpretations of handed-down stories, such as the myth of Icarus or a Senegalese folk tale. In many of the works, colour and composition can be traced back to aspects of Western art history, such as religious iconography, vanitas still lifes, and Fauvist colour experiments. Henri Matisse, in particular, is a clear source of inspiration: Touam makes still lifes based on his approach to composition and abstraction, or cites the compositions of individual works. In musical terms one could speak of an artist ‘sampling’ earlier works in order to create an entirely unique and contemporary sound; at the same time, citing masterpieces is an elegant way for a French-Algerian woman to enter the domain of dominant Western art history.
Digital collages
Touam uses objects to convey narratives. Each object is not merely a visual element, but also carries the history and culture from which it originates. The artist builds her compositions around this symbolic significance. She experiments with different arrangements, makes minute adjustments, and photographs every step. She then combines the individual studio shots into a single digital still life. Each tableau is thus underpinned by hundreds, and in some cases even thousands, of photographs. The result is a syncretic still life, in which the cultural references coalesce into a coherent whole, while retaining their distinct identities.
Well after Touam had developed her own artistic language she discovered the book Tout-Monde (1993) by the poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant, in which he articulates a vision of identity that is no longer rooted in homeland, origin and tradition, but in fragmentation, dispersal and chance. Glissard’s book lent words to what Touam had explored for years through images. In her work, references to the past become a means of imagining a present and a future in which the world is no longer divided into centre and periphery, and where cultural exchange is the norm.
With the objects as narrative components, Maya Inès Touam addresses themes close to her heart: migration, motherhood, displacement, and the relationship between people and nature. She also rescues voices from obscurity, such as those of female leaders who were prominent in their day, but who historians have all but ignored. In this way her rich references to myths and masterpieces take on the agility of stories passed down by word of mouth, as their narrator adapts them to the situation and the spirit of the time. By reactivating them, they find an echo in the present.
Biography
Belongings (Ce qui nous appartient) is the first solo museum exhibition of work by Maya Inès Touam (1988, Paris) in the Netherlands. She has exhibited internationally in MAACAL (Marrakech), the Fridman Gallery (New York), Le Manège (Dakar), and Fondation H and the Musée national de l’histoire de l’Immigration in Paris. In addition to being part of the Huis Marseille collection, her work has been acquired by the Victoria and Albert Museum (London) and the North Carolina Museum of Art (Raleigh, USA).
