By Ava Hess, Yubai Shi, and Sarp Tanrıdağ
On April 29, 2026, the UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies hosted the graduate colloquium “The Visual Culture of Algeria Through Exchange, Circulation, and Global Networks,” a day-long hybrid event held both in person and online. Bringing together nine graduate students and early-career scholars from institutions across North America, Europe, and North Africa, the colloquium was the first event at UCLA devoted entirely to the study of Algeria’s art history. Organized by graduate students Ava Hess (Art History), Yubai Shi (Art History), and Sarp Tanrıdağ (Architectural History), the program fostered interdisciplinary dialogue across art history, history, political science, literature, and architecture. Structured around three thematic panels, the colloquium examined Algerian visual culture from the Ottoman period to the present through the lens of movement, exchange, and interconnected histories. Collectively, the presentations positioned Algeria as a dynamic center of artistic production and cross-cultural encounter, highlighting its longstanding connections to Mediterranean, African, West Asian, and global networks while challenging narratives that isolate Algerian cultural production within national or colonial frameworks.
Ava Hess (PhD Candidate, UCLA Art History) delivers opening remarks. Photo: CNES.
The first panel, “Transregional Circulation,” explored the mobility of artists, objects, images, and ideas across geographic and political boundaries. Papers addressed subjects ranging from the mural paintings of Ahmed Bey’s Palace in Constantine and representations of Algerian art during the Second World War and the Algerian War of Independence to the afterlives of colonial deportation in contemporary music. The three presentations demonstrated how artistic production in Algeria has long been shaped by transregional exchange while also prompting discussion about dispersed archives, colonial legacies, and the challenges of recovering Algerian perspectives within transnational histories. The second panel, “Signs and Symbols,” examined how modern artists, artistic collectives, and political publications reinterpreted visual forms to negotiate questions of identity, memory, and political belonging. Through case studies such as artist Mohammed Khadda, the Aouchem group, and the socialist journal Dhū al-Faqār, presenters explored how calligraphy, Amazigh motifs, tattoo, folklore, and religious iconography were transformed and reappropriated into new visual languages in the colonial and post-independence periods. Discussion emphasized the relationship between artistic practice and collective cultural production, as well as the role of material forms (including painting, printmaking, publishing, and tattooing) in shaping how visual signs circulate and acquire meaning. The final panel, “Archives Revisited,” considered how writers, artists, and scholars engage with fragmented and politically charged archives. Papers explored Algerian Arabic poetry, the afterlives of French colonial postcards, and contemporary artistic engagements with sonic archives, demonstrating how historical materials are continually reactivated through new artistic and scholarly practices. The discussion highlighted archives not as fixed repositories of the past but as sites of ongoing negotiation, where questions of memory, agency, and historical representation remain central.
Fadila Yahou (Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne) presents her paper on Franco-American artistic networks of the 1960s. Photo: CNES
Across all three panels, the colloquium fostered a continuous and wide-ranging conversation, notable for bringing together historians of Algeria working across such different periods and methodologies — from Ottoman-era palace decoration to postcolonial performance art — in the same room. The absence of rigid periodization allowed unexpected resonances and connections to emerge in the Q&A sessions that followed each panel and in the discussions that continued over a shared couscous lunch. The organizers hope that the conversations begun here will extend into ongoing collaboration, resource-sharing, and future research among a growing community of emerging scholars working on Algeria’s many visual histories.
Top image: Lumière du Crépuscule, artwork by Khadija Seddiki. Courtesy of the artist, cropped.