Allegories / A Quest for Change by Houria Niati

About

Houria Niati trained in Community Arts in Algeria; she settled in London in 1977 where she studied Fine Art at the Croydon College of Art and an MA Fine Art at Middlessex University. Houria has exhibited widely since 1983. Her work and installations include painting, film, poetry and her live performances of Arab-Andalusian songs. Houria's most powerful installations No To Torture ( based on deconstructing Delacroix's famous painting The Women of Algiers ), and Bringing Water from The Fountain Has Nothing Romantic About It, in which she explores Orientalist images and colonial postcards, have build her reputation internationally. Most of Houria's work is intimately self-referential, documenting her own multicultural history. Family photos, snippets of the past are hidden behind a veil of whimsical calligraphy written in English, French and Arabic and based on the artist's own poetry, questioning the process of integration and what it means to live with several languages simultaneously. Her work is idiosyncratic, based on identity/dichotomy, displacement/multicultural environments and experiencing war. Although the artist continues to develop work in forms such as painting, poetry, performance and music, in recent years her artistic practice has expended to include digital media, where the artist continues to explore notions of identity and displacement as shown in this exhibition at Watermans.