Franco-Algerian artist Salim Le Kouaghet presents
“In the Beginning Was the Alif”
at the Grand Mosque of Paris
Franco-Algerian artist Salim Le Kouaghet takes over the gardens of the Grand Mosque of Paris with In the Beginning Was the Alif, a sensory and contemplative exhibition open to visitors until 17 July 2025.
The exhibition offers an immersion into an artistic universe where abstraction and light evoke exile, memory and belonging.
Until 17 July 2025, the Grand Mosque of Paris hosts In the Beginning Was the Alif, an exhibition by the Franco-Algerian painter organised in partnership with AYN Gallery. The event, inaugurated in the presence of the mosque’s rector Chems-Eddine Hafiz, invites the public to discover a singular body of work situated at the intersection of abstraction, graphic language and inner exploration.
Salim Le Kouaghet, Yasmine Azzi-Kohlhepp, director of AYN Gallery, and Chems-Eddine Hafiz, rector of the Grand Mosque of Paris (photo provided).
A discreet yet essential figure on the contemporary art scene, Le Kouaghet — trained between Constantine, Algiers and Paris — has developed for more than fifty years a deeply personal pictorial language. Across his canvases unfolds an entire universe composed of nocturnal light, fragments of memory and gestures imbued with silence.
The Alif as an inaugural gesture
In this unprecedented exhibition, the artist places the Alif, the first letter of the Arabic alphabet, at the centre of his practice. Painted, incised and embedded into the surface, it becomes a vertical axis — a sentinel standing between sky and earth.
“I broke a thousand and one mirrors to bring buried memories to light,” he explains.
Each work appears as a palimpsest, where calligraphic signs, fragments of Kabyle carpets, vertical lines and ritual squares intersect.
“I discovered the triangle of my Kabylia. As in the past, I reinvent my writing: the vertical stroke, the horizontal line, and a random calligraphic drawing that inscribes itself onto the surface of my canvases,” the artist notes.
Rejecting academic conventions, Le Kouaghet approaches the canvas as a space of resistance and reconstruction. His works, marked by a reinvented craftsmanship, question identity, exile, memory and transmission.
Wast-ed-Dar, a visual and spiritual matrix
At the heart of the exhibition lies the concept of Wast-ed-Dar, the inner courtyard characteristic of traditional Algerian architecture. A place of passage, rest, conversation and ritual, it becomes here a space of artistic resonance.
Presented within the lush garden setting of the mosque, the installation pays tribute to this architectural structure open to the sky — a symbol of hospitality and dialogue.
For Le Kouaghet, this ancestral space becomes a matrix, both an intimate anchor and a field of visual experimentation.
“Only the swallows can freely enter the Wast-ed-Dar,” he writes in a text accompanying the installation.
Between the lines of his canvases, fragments of intimacy and collective memory quietly emerge.
Painting as performance
Painter, performer and former chief lighting designer at the Olympia theatre in Paris, Salim Le Kouaghet also explores the stage as an extension of his painting.
In recent years he has developed live performances in which he paints in real time, accompanied by a pianist or a reciter. These moments of improvisation — inspired by the music of Ravel, Debussy and Albéniz — reveal a form of painting in motion, alive and resonating with the breath of sound.
An international trajectory
Though discreet, Salim Le Kouaghet enjoys growing institutional recognition. His works are held in the collections of the Centre Pompidou and the Centre national des arts plastiques (CNAP).
Exhibited in Paris, London and Oran by AYN Gallery, his practice now unfolds within an increasingly international context.
Several exhibitions are scheduled for 2025, including in Algiers, Cairo, Los Angeles, Abu Dhabi and Cape Town. A major retrospective dedicated to his work will also take place in 2026 at Le Silo, the contemporary art centre in Château-Thierry.
A cultural encounter not to be missed
With In the Beginning Was the Alif, the Grand Mosque of Paris becomes the setting for a rare encounter between contemporary art, spirituality and memory.
The exhibition offers visitors a journey into the world of an artist who is both deeply rooted and profoundly universal — one whose work resonates with the major questions of our time.
