ABU DHABI ART 2025: Transmissions et traces

At Abu Dhabi Art 2025, Transmissions et traces brings together Bilal Bahir, Faiza Djeffal-Tahraoui and Salim Le Kouaghet, three artists whose practices are rooted in the MENA region. Spanning three generations and three territories, their works explore how memory and emotion endure and are transformed through gesture and material.

Here, transmission is not understood as an uninterrupted continuum, but through what persists beyond rupture, displacement and transformation. In each of these practices, material becomes a repository of memory and the starting point for new narratives.

Born in Iraq in 1988 and based in Belgium, Bilal Bahir draws on childhood, play and the cultural memory of Mesopotamia. Across maps, documents and pages from old books, figures and dreamlike episodes bring personal memory into contact with political experience. His work has received the Élisabeth Burdot Prize, the Rouge-Cloître Discovery Prize and the Lambert Lecrenier Foundation’s Biennial Prize. It is held in collections including those of the Belgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the National Bank of Belgium.

Faiza Djeffal-Tahraoui, born in Algeria in 1963 and based in Oran, transforms landscapes and fragmented memories into abstract “mis-forms”. Moving between painting, weaving, collage and mixed media, she creates an emotional cartography shaped by Oran, its coastline and Mediterranean light. Her work has been presented at the Museum of Modern Art of Oran, the Ahmed Zabana National Museum and the Oran Contemporary Art Biennale, as well as in France and Spain.

Born in Algeria in 1951 and based in France, Salim Le Kouaghet inscribes memory and exile into the physical transformation of the canvas through stretching, stapling, nailing and laceration. Arabic letters and Amazigh signs emerge from the material around the recurring form of the Alif. His exploration of Wast-Ed-Dar—the heart of the traditional Algerian home—connects intimate memory, architecture and the sacred. A recipient of the Prix des Beaux-Arts and the Salon de Montrouge Prize, he became, in 2025, the first contemporary artist to exhibit inside the Grande Mosquée de Paris. His works are held in major public collections, including the Centre Pompidou, the Fonds national d’art contemporain, managed by the Centre national des arts plastiques, and FRAC Île-de-France.

Brought into resonance, these three practices form a living palimpsest in which documents, landscapes, signs and materials sustain the persistence of memory. Rather than preserving the past as a static archive, they reactivate it at the intersection of the intimate and the collective.