Exhibition “In the Beginning Was the Alif” by Salim Le Kouaghet gives the Alif the force of a primal chant
At the Grand Mosque of Paris, Salim Le Kouaghet gives the Alif the force of a primal chant
With “In the Beginning Was the Alif”, the Grand Mosque of Paris is, for the first time, hosting a contemporary art exhibition of such magnitude. Franco-Algerian artist Salim Le Kouaghet unveils a dense, intimate, metaphysical body of work, where visual abstraction, memory of exile, and spirituality meet in subtle ways.
It is a discreet yet grand exhibition, where the letter becomes a symbol, and the symbol, a vertigo. With In the Beginning Was the Alif, presented throughout the summer in the Emir Abdelkader Hall of the Grand Mosque of Paris, Salim Le Kouaghet offers a pictorial meditation that transcends affiliations to summon a world of silence, light, and inner resistance. The project, supported by curator Yasmine Azzi-Kohlhepp, director of AYN Gallery and a committed figure on the Euro-Mediterranean art scene, was inaugurated in the presence of Rector Chems-Eddine Hafiz, before a large and visibly moved audience. It must be said that the event is quite exceptional: never before had the Grand Mosque hosted such a dialogue between contemporary art, Islamic architecture, and postcolonial memory.
A work between two shores
Trained in Constantine, Algiers, and Paris, Salim Le Kouaghet belongs to a generation of artists long overlooked by French institutions—too “Oriental” for the market, too conceptual for orientalist clichés. Yet his work, which features in the collections of the Centre Pompidou and the CNAP, reflects a patient and rigorous path, developed away from media spotlights but nourished by a strong visual demand and fidelity to both intimate and collective history. On his canvases, no narrative horizon appears: fragments of Kabyle carpets, vertical lacerations, ritual squares, muted inks, and earthy tones evoke a mental territory, explored in silence. The letter “Alif”, first of the Arabic alphabet, becomes more than a motif: a column of air, a primal breath standing between sky and earth, between birth and dissolution.
A grammar of retreat
Rejecting academism and stylistic effects, Le Kouaghet treats his canvases as surfaces of resistance. Each work appears as a palimpsest, a layer where pictorial gesture, textile imprint, and the trace of text coexist without discourse ever overpowering sensation. The artist claims the title of artisan—not out of humility, but to signal a relationship to the world where the hand precedes theory. At the heart of the exhibition lies an installation inspired by the Wast-ed-Dar, the central courtyard in Algerian domestic architecture. Not a reconstruction nor an illustration, but a space of resonance. Presented within the mosque’s garden setting, the structure evokes a space of passage, contemplation, and listening. “Only the swallows can freely access the inside of the Wast-ed-Dar,” writes Le Kouaghet in an accompanying text—a poetic way to remind us that intimacy, like exile, knows no walls.
An art in motion
Salim Le Kouaghet is not only a painter: he is a former head lighting technician at the Olympia, as well as a performer and improviser. For several years, he has extended his pictorial work through live performances, often in duet with a pianist or a reader, where gestures harmonize with the music of Ravel, Debussy, or Albéniz. A painting in action, traversed by breath, listening, and the present moment. A recognition that may be late, but is nonetheless powerful. The Paris exhibition is only the first step in a broader journey: it will travel in 2025 to Algiers, Cairo, Los Angeles, Abu Dhabi, and Cape Town, before a retrospective in 2026 at Le Silo, Contemporary Art Center in Château-Thierry. A trajectory that says something about our time: the time has finally come to recognize, beyond established circuits, the minoritized artistic paths and silent voices of Mediterranean modernity.
This exhibition deserves praise not only for the relevance of its engaged curatorship but also for the bold gesture of the Grand Mosque, which opens itself to another way of celebrating beauty—without dogma or borders. Bathed in filtered light, the exhibition feels like a suspended poem, a prayer without words. And one leaves the space as if waking from a dream, with the strange sensation of having touched, even briefly, that which precedes all form, all language: breath.
—F. Guémiah
Salim Le Kouaghet, the painter of vertical silence
Born in 1952 in Constantine, Salim Le Kouaghet is a Franco-Algerian artist whose career defies easy classification. Trained between the Fine Arts school in Algiers and the vibrant Parisian art scene of the 1970s, he developed early on a singular artistic approach, at the crossroads of painting, calligraphy, textiles, and installation.
Long marginalized by official circuits, he has built a rigorously ascetic body of work, marked by the memory of exile, traditional Maghrebi architecture, and the mysticism of gesture. A former head lighting technician at the Olympia concert hall, he brings into his art a deep relationship with light and rhythm, extending his painting through live performances often in dialogue with classical music. Featured in the collections of the Centre Pompidou and the Centre national des arts plastiques (CNAP), Le Kouaghet has exhibited in Paris, London, Oran, and Beirut, supported notably by AYN Gallery. His meditative and layered work is now receiving long-overdue recognition. In 2025, In the Beginning Was the Alif will tour several capitals, before a retrospective in 2026 at Le Silo – Contemporary Art Center of Château-Thierry.
Yasmine Azzi-Kohlhepp, transmitter of forms and memory
Founder and director of AYN Gallery, based between Paris and Oran, Yasmine Azzi-Kohlhepp has, for the past fifteen years, emerged as one of the quiet but pivotal figures of dialogue between the art scenes of the Maghreb, the Middle East, and Europe. Franco-Algerian, trained in art history and international relations, she develops a rigorous curatorial vision, attentive to marginalized trajectories, to the writings of memory, and to practices of the in-between.
Founded in 2010, AYN Gallery defends a radically contemporary line, while claiming artisanal, spiritual, and political roots. A specialist in artists outside the mainstream, she has accompanied the work of figures such as Salim Le Kouaghet and initiated numerous traveling exhibitions between the northern and southern shores of the Mediterranean. With In the Beginning Was the Alif, she presents a project that is both poetic and committed, reaffirming her ambition: to make the artistic gesture a space of transmission, listening, and decentering.
