To browse Academia. Identity and belonging increasingly feature as themes in the work of contemporary artists, a focus that seems particularly felt by those artists who either personally or through their families have experienced dispersal and migration. The thesis explores how fourteen Algerian and Franco-Algerian artists position themselves and are positioned by others to identity and community.
The difficult intertwined histories of Algeria and France fraught with the consequences of colonisation, the impact of migration, and, in Algeria, civil war, provides a rich terrain for the exploration of identity formation.
Positionality theory is used to analyse the process of identity formation in the artists and how this developed over the course of their careers and in their art.
An important part of the analysis is concerned with how the artists positioned themselves consciously or inadvertently to fixed or fluid conceptions of identity and how this was reflected in their artworks.
The thesis examines the complex politics of identity and belonging that extends beyond nationality and diaspora and implicates a range of other identifications including that of class, ethnicity, gender, sexuality and career choice. In this essay for Ibraaz, writer and critic Alice Planel explores the conditions of artistic production in Algiers, a city still affected by the legacy of a devastating civil war in the s.
