This Research Seminar brings together five scholars whose work is at the centre of recent investigations into the entangled histories of modern art, architecture and archives between Algeria and France. Presentations by the speakers highlight and interrogate the significant role of artistic production, networks and archives in the construction of narratives of modern and contemporary art practices (both collective and individual), national identity, cultural exchange, memory and history, and the discipline of art history. The seminar aims to contribute to the remapping of the diverse aspects of cultural production and reception that were, and are today, a crucial and often contested component of late colonial, decolonial and post-colonial relations between Algeria, the Maghreb, and France.
Friday 24 April 2026, 9.30am – 5.00pm, Younger Hall 2, University of St Andrews
Speakers:
Prof Sheila Crane, Architectural History Department at the University of Virginia; Visiting Fellow at CRASSH, University of Cambridge, 2025/6
Dr Katarzyna Falęcka, Art History, School of Arts and Cultures, Newcastle University
Dr Emile Goudal, Centre d’étude des arts contemporains, Université de Lille
Dr Lydia Haddag, Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne / InVisu (CNRS–INHA)
Dr Constance Sjödin, University of Oxford
Contact: Prof Natalie Adamson, School of Art History, [email protected]
Funded by the School of Art History, the Centre for French History and Culture, the Centre for Art and Politics, and the Centre for Contemporary Art.
Image: Dennis Adams (b. 1948), The Algerian Folie, 1989, mixed-media installation. Magiciens de la terre (18 May–14 August 1989), Paris. The work includes two photographs taken in Camp Sirocco, Algeria Charles Courrière for Paris Match. Source: © Dennis Adams.
