Arab Immigration and the French Art Scene

Ayache belongs to the latest generation of artists born in France to Arab immigrant parents. Some use traditional painting and sculpture, while others experiment with new media. What most of them have in common is a desire to use their artistic practice to explore their own sense of identity, thereby contributing in fresh ways to the French art scene. 

“Exchanges between France and the Arab world have contributed enormously to the artistic scene here,” said Jack Lang, the president of the Arab World Institute in Paris and a former French culture minister.

The Arab World Institute staged an exhibition in 2024 entitled “Arabofuturs,” showcasing work by contemporary French artists of Arab heritage and their counterparts from several Arab countries. Their paintings, sculptures and installations contain visions of the future that play with, and sometimes subvert, Western conventions of science fiction.

While this exhibition gazed into the future, the Museum of Modern Art in Paris staged a major retrospective. “Arab Presences—Modern Art and Decolonisation: Paris 1908-1988” brought together more than 200 works by well over 100 Arab artists who studied, worked or exhibited in the French capital during the 20th century.

Most of the works on display were borrowed from French collections, although some had been languishing in storage. The exhibition explored how Paris influenced these artists and how they affected the French art scene. 

“There has been a lot of rediscovering of non-Western modernist movements,” said the exhibition curator, Morad Montazami. “We tried to unveil the undocumented relationships between Arab and French artists, which was well overdue in terms of our post-colonial consciousness.”

The arrival of Arab artists

Paris was arguably the capital of the art world from the late 19th to the mid-20th century. The young artists who arrived from the Francophone countries of North Africa and the Levant discovered a city of contradictions. Paris was a place of cultural connection but also exclusion, a center for anti-colonialism but also the heart of an empire.

“The point of “Arab Presences” was to show that Arab artists are part of French art history and part of the Parisian art scene,” said Silvia Naef, an art historian.

The exhibition included works by some of the giants of 20^th-century Arab art, such as the Egyptian sculptor Mahmoud Mukhtar, who arrived in Paris in 1912.

Mukhtar’s knowledge of ancient Egyptian art, together with the friendships he formed in France with Egyptian nationalists, inspired one of his most famous sculptures, Egypt’s Awakening. Many art historians consider him the founder of Egyptian modernism.

Also on display were works by two of Morocco’s most distinguished modern artists, Farid Belkahia and Mohamed Melehi, who passed through Paris half a century later. They spearheaded the Casablanca School, an avant-garde movement in the 1960s that aimed to bring art closer to ordinary people.

Belkahia rejected the canvas and oil paints he had used at art school in Paris in favor of traditional Moroccan materials such as leather and vellum, and natural dyes like henna. Melehi combined Western geometric patterns with Islamic art, switching to car paint as a cheap, everyday alternative to acrylics.

“Arab Presences” also demonstrated how artistic influences between Paris and the Arab world traveled in both directions, with Arab artists leaving their marks on the French capital.

One of these was the self-taught Algerian artist Baya Mahieddine, who arrived on the Paris art scene as a teenager in 1947. Her vivid, fantastical paintings of women defy classification, with critics variously describing her work as surrealist, primitive, naive and modern.

Pablo Picasso later cited her as an inspiration for his “Women of Algiers” series of paintings.

“The Arab artists who went to Paris definitely enriched the scene,” said Roy. “You can only be a hub if you are international and welcome all these different influences and artists. Otherwise, you become very provincial.”

Next-gen artists born on French soil

In the 1990s, the first generation of dual-heritage artists started to make their mark. Unlike the Arab painters and sculptors who passed through Paris as part of their training, these artists were born in France.

The French Algerian artist Zineb Sedira is one of the most prominent figures of this generation. Highly influenced by the Algerian films she saw growing up in the Paris suburbs, she preserves and re-creates cultural memory through video art and photography. In 2022 Sedira represented France at the Venice Biennale.

“Algeria coproduced a lot of films with France in the 1960s,” Sedira said, “so it is easy for me to talk about my two identities through film.”

As a child, Neïla Czermak Ichti, a young French Tunisian artist, was delighted to discover that her name, written backwards, spelled “alien.” She filled the margins of her schoolbooks with doodles of monsters, influenced by the “Alien” movies.

“We have identities that are different from the so-called French identity, even if that identity doesn’t really exist,” Czermak Ichti said.

Ballpoint is her medium of choice, sometimes intensified with vibrant acrylic paint. She draws her own face stitched onto the body of an animal or creates domestic scenes in which the familiar sits uneasily with the bizarre.

“In the media and cinema, we see stereotypical narratives, very narrow ways of representing characters,” she said. “I depict characters with as much complexity as possible so that it’s difficult to put a label on them.”

Whereas the direction of travel for Arab artists in the 20th century was south to north, many French Arab artists are now making journeys in the opposite direction. They want to reconnect with their origins and explore the cultural heritage of those countries.

“This heritage was not understood as part of the national heritage of France, whereas it infuses our society and co-constructs the identities of these artists,” said Frédérique Mehdi, the Arab World Institute’s head of cultural activities. “We are looking in the rearview mirror—not in a nostalgic way but to understand who we are.”

Research into the past led Czermak Ichti to discover Baya, in whose work she found echoes of her own fascination with strange worlds and hybrid creatures. She was inspired to create a body of work that she exhibited in 2024 alongside a selection of Baya’s paintings.

Most young French artists of Arab heritage do not see themselves as rooted in one place and one culture. Many circulate between two or more countries, making art in their own studios or collaborating with local galleries.

Marie Obegi, a French Lebanese painter and illustrator, uses portraiture to explore the human psyche. An avid reader of manga comic books, she was drawn to Japanese culture and moved to Kyoto for two years. She is now based in London.

In recent years Obegi has consciously reconnected with her Lebanese heritage and today runs a residency in Beirut for visiting artists.

“Not having a sense that I am something from somewhere is what gives me the ability to feel comfortable being ‘other’ in different places,” she said.

These artists draw strength and inspiration from their multifaceted identities. They embrace opportunities to forge new cultural connections while creating work that challenges perceptions and inspires people.

“My dual heritage enables me to show a different point of view from the purely Western,” said Ayache. “I see my work as a bridge between two cultures, and I want to show my other culture in an unexpected way, free from clichés or preconceived ideas.”