Amina Menia (Algeria) is a mixed-media artist currently living and working in Algiers, Algeria.
Her work questions the relationship between architectural and historical spaces and challenges conventional notions around the exhibition space.
In response to the local art scene, she developed her own language. With a minimal lexicon, she underlines historical places, revisits urban legends,and points out urban gaps by ephemeral interventions. Working across installation and sculpture, her art encourages exchange, interaction and attempts to probe social changes through ‘daily urban practices’.
Extra Muros (2005-ongoing) is a series of site specific installations throughout Algiers – an invitation to revisit this city and then its reappropriation. The work has encountered so many obstacles that most of its chapters remain unrealised. Therefore, it intersects directly with its problematics of denouncing confiscated spaces, confiscated memory and lack of freedom.
For Chrysanthemums (2010-2011), she proposed a photographic installation in frontal relation with the viewer. She documented useless monuments charged with history.
Amina has exhibited her work nationally and internationally, including Bastion 23 Art Center (Algiers), Pontevedra Biennale (Spain), Galerie Anne de Villepoix (Paris), Cornerhouse (Manchester) and Museum of Modern Art of Algiers. In 2008, she took part in Visiting Arts’ Artist-to-Artist programme, invited by Zineb Sedira.
In 2012, she undertook a residency in Marseille, working on the displacement of an “extracted” element of Algiers.
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Please note all artist-in-residence biographies are accurate at the time of their residency. For up-to-date bios please visit the artist’s website.