Maya Inès Touam – Belongings

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.