My work has been deeply informed by my personal history. I was born in Algeria from a Franco/Spanish family. I lived from extensive periods in South Africa, South America and I am now based in the UK.
I am known for my contribution as a 'pied noir' artist to the emerging Franco/Algerian art movement, with a body of work - paintings, digital artworks - that strongly critiqued colonial discourses that excused French dominance.
As a young adult, I lived in South Africa for two years under the apartheid. I was teaching at the University of Fort Hare, a key institution in higher education for black Africans, which counted among its former students a number of prominent leading opponents of the apartheid regime among them Nelson Mandela, Govan Mbeki and Oliver Tambo.
This was my first hand experience of a society based on discrimination, repression and deprivation of civil and political rights for a large part of the population. It deeply marked me and fuelled in me a sense for the politically, socially and humanly acceptable and my work seeks to make an innovative contribution to the artistic debate around the question of identity and representations. I have long questioned prevailing notions of place, nostalgia and memory as fundamental elements of identity formation in my work.
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