“My work emerges from the displacement of images, objects and narratives. Through photography, I compose tableaux where Western, Oriental, Pan-African and Mediterranean heritages intersect. Still life becomes, for me, a living space, traversed by the intimate, the collective and history. I question the provenance of images as much as their destination, seeking to reveal what objects silently carry: lineages, beliefs, wounded memories, but also possible forms of transmission and hybridity.”
Maya Inès Touam is a French-Algerian visual artist and photographer, born in 1988 in Paris. A graduate of the Beaux-Arts de Paris, she develops a photographic practice at the crossroads of image-making, installation and sculptural composition. Her work questions the provenance of images, the circulation of objects and narratives of lineage, placing diasporic memory at the heart of a reflection on cultural heritage, displaced identities and forms of transmission.
Her work proceeds through association, displacement and deconstruction between Western, Oriental, Pan-African and Mediterranean cultures. Through meticulously constructed photographic tableaux, she brings together domestic objects, textiles, furniture, symbols, beliefs and fragments of memory to compose new hybrid narratives. Still life becomes, in her work, a living space, traversed by the intimate, the collective and history. By reactivating the pictorial codes of composition, Maya Inès Touam explores the links between heritage, coloniality, identity and the survival of forms.
Her work has been presented in numerous institutions and international events, including Huis Marseille in Amsterdam with Memento in 2025, the Tasweer Photo Festival in Doha with As I Lay Between Two Seas the same year, the Musée national de l’histoire de l’immigration in Paris with Juifs et musulmans de France: de l’Empire colonial à l’Hexagone in 2022, the Institut des Cultures d’Islam in Paris with Silsila, le voyage des regards, Fondation Blachère, Lagos Photo Festival in Nigeria, MAACAL in Marrakech, the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, Le 104 in Paris, the Maison de la Photographie in Lille, the Bibliothèque nationale François-Mitterrand, as well as Les Rencontres de la photographie in Arles, where she was presented as part of the Prix Découverte Louis Roederer in 2022.
She has also taken part in several research and production residencies, notably with the Fonds de dotation Compagnie Fruitière in Saint-Louis, Senegal, in 2024; at AARC in Algiers; at Fondation Zinsou in Benin in 2022; at the Musée de la Fondation Slaoui in Morocco in 2021; at Fondation Blachère in 2020; at Jardin Rouge / Montresso Art Foundation in Marrakech between 2018 and 2020; at Fondation Alliances in Casablanca; and at the Institut français in Algiers.
Maya Inès Touam was selected for the Norval Sovereign African Art Prize in 2025 and received the ADAGP Ekphrasis grant in 2024. She was selected for the Prix Découverte Louis Roederer in 2022, nominated for the World Press Photo Joop Swart Masterclass and the Foam Paul Huf Award in 2018, and was awarded the Fondation Alliances / MAACAL LCC Prize as well as the Bourse du Talent in 2017. Her works are held in several public and private collections, including the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh and Huis Marseille in Amsterdam.