The exhibition ALIF – A Journey into Salim Le Kouaghet’s World is an invitation to enter the universe of a painter of memory, sign, and exile. It marks a historic moment: for the first time, Salim Le Kouaghet’s work is being presented in Algeria, his country of birth, after a long artistic journey in France and abroad.
The title ALIF refers to the first letter of the Arabic alphabet — a symbol of origin, verticality, and beginning. This letter runs through Salim Le Kouaghet’s work like a spine of meaning, an endless point of departure. Stylized, reimagined, and intertwined with other scripts, it becomes the matrix of a unique visual language.
Since the 1970s, Salim Le Kouaghet has developed a dense and layered body of work, shaped by the wounds of the Algerian War, the experience of exile, and the reconstruction of memory. Across his canvases, he overlays strata of Amazigh signs, freeform scripts, colorful bands, textures, and fragments of remembrance.
His work is rooted in both concrete places, Aïn Askar, D’Arcy-Sainte-Restitue, Oran, Paris, London and symbolic spaces: the empty house, the destroyed douar, the vanished garden, Wast-ed-Dar. He weaves together the intimate and the political, tradition and modernity, rupture and continuity.
After being shown in London, then Paris, ALIF now comes to Oran closing a circle, or perhaps opening a new one. This return, far from nostalgic, reactivates the essential questions that permeate his entire practice: What remains of a lost place? How can one write the unspeakable? What becomes of identity when it is no longer tied to a fixed territory?
ALIF is less a retrospective than a crossing. A journey through signs, wounds, and light. A plunge into an autonomous pictorial world, yet one deeply marked by history.
