Since the beginning of the 2000s, artist, director, producer and teacher Katia Kameli has been developing a dense and multifaceted body of work. Grounded in two cultures – French and Algerian – she questions the blind spots of history, taking up the role of an intermediary between different territories. Following the paths she herself has chosen, she makes connections between distant facts, repairs broken relationships and ensures the voices of those who have been ignored are heard. In so doing, she writes a counter-narrative in which her different subjects of research mingle and combine to weave together a multitude of perspectives. Kameli’s art lies at the crossroads of poetry, visual studies and artisanal techniques. It is the fruit of a construction of relationships, relations that are built out of affinity, proximity and friendship. Her first solo show in these two Parisian cultural institutions brings together an ensemble that includes existing works and her new production.

The exhibition at ICI puts her creations of the last 20 years under the spotlight. It showcases a consistent approach in which narratives circulate and are transformed, transposed and superposed across different places and times. In the exhibition, Kameli takes on the role of a translator: her photos, videos, drawings and installations bring into play a formal and conceptual language that comes together in an in-between space situated between different languages, sounds, aesthetics and cultures. Le Cantique des oiseaux [The Canticle of the Birds], a project co-produced by La Criée, Centre for contemporary art in Rennes includes a video she filmed in the Goutte d’Or neighbourhood of Paris in partnership with the Conservatoire du 18e – Gustave Charpentier. Stream of Stories, a work that addresses the theme of metamorphosis in Kalîla wa Dimna, the fables that inspired Jean de La Fontaine, is enhanced by a tufted tapestry designed in collaboration with textile artist Manon Daviet.

The exhibition at Bétonsalon is organised around the Roman algérien; it presents the three videos that comprise the latter (shot between 2016 and 2019) and reveals Kameli’s research for a fourth chapter that takes as its starting point La Nouba des femmes du mont Chenoua [The Nubah of the Women of Mount Chenoua], a film directed by the Algerian filmmaker and novelist Assia Djebar in 1977. By basing itself on the first Algerian film directed by a woman (copies of which still circulate today), Kameli seems to be continuing the work of Djebar, who looked back at the stories of women in the resistance during the war for independence in the town and mountains of Cherchell. By collecting accounts from women of different generations, she composes a polyphonic, living narrative in which personal and collective stories are made audible amidst the complexities of a colonial past.

The title of the exhibition, “Yesterday is returning and I can hear it“, comes from Women of Algiers in Their Apartments, a 1980 novel by Assia Djebar.