Rabah Ould Brahim has always sought to capture the image where it hides: in the fissures of memory, in the shadowy corners of everyday life, in the fractures of a world oscillating between reality and hallucination. His work unfolds as an intimate archaeology of images, an attempt to reveal their invisible layers and buried residues.
His installations and visual explorations traverse flesh, imprint, and trace. They summon an aesthetic of fragility, where the organic and the technological intertwine in constant tension. The artist thus questions the shifting boundary between the living and the artificial, between presence and its spectral double.
Dividing Line
A crowd dissolving into shadows, while two silent figures remain apart.
From early experimental videos to recent projects integrating artificial intelligence, his work is defined by a desire to unsettle the stability of representation. Each image becomes a site of friction: at once alluring and unsettling, familiar and strange.
In dialogue with the history of art as well as with contemporary languages, Rabah Ould Brahim develops a singular vision: an inquiry into fragmented memory, multiple identities, and the transformation of images in the digital age. His current projects whether in the form of installations, visual series, or experiments with AI extend this search for a space where art becomes not only an image, but also an experience of thought and perception.
Shadow Figures
Exploring the thresholds between light, darkness, and the human trace.
Silent Witnesses
Two figures standing at the edge of time, eroded yet unbroken.
Orb of Oblivion
Figures drawn to the blinding core, dissolving into light and shadow.
The Language of Shadows
A ritual inscribed in words and bodies, where presence dissolves into script.
Kafkaïne
A fictional dose probing the contamination of imagination and the absurdity of reality.
Dispersed Identity
A visual exploration of identity dissolution within a group.
A Practice in Tension
In Ould Brahim’s work, the image is never a smooth surface. It resists, it fractures, it doubles. The artist constructs spaces where perception falters, where the viewer is invited to question their own certainties. His works do not deliver definitive answers; they open breaches, interstices, through which imagination can circulate.
Memory and Metamorphosis
Memory holds a central place in his practice. Not faithful memory, but one that deforms, fragments, and decays. His installations and visual explorations embody this instability in shifting forms: wavering silhouettes, spectral images, residual traces. Within this fragile space, the artist questions how we construct our identities in the face of ever more fleeting images.
The Digital Age as Material
If digital technology and artificial intelligence appear in his work, it is less as mere tools than as fields of inquiry. Ould Brahim repurposes these technologies to question what they reveal about our desires, fears, and hunger for illusion. AI, in his practice, is not simply a generator of images but a critical mirror: it underscores the slippages between real and virtual, between what we think we see and what we project.
A Vision
Ultimately, Rabah Ould Brahim’s art takes its place within a tradition of radical questioning: what is an image? What does it tell us about our time, and about ourselves? By excavating shadows and revealing fissures, he proposes an experience in which the viewer becomes an explorer, confronted with the instability of the visible.
Summit of Echoes
Where the solitary gesture meets the endless murmur of the many.
Works and Exhibitions
Since the early 2000s, Rabah Ould Brahim has asserted a singular approach in which the body, flesh, and memory become the grounds for radical visual experimentation. His installations do not aim to reassure: they immerse the viewer in zones of disturbance, where the image continually metamorphoses and resists the gaze.
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La Chair – video installation, École des Beaux-Arts d’Alger (2002).
This foundational work confronts the viewer with the raw materiality of the body. Through fragmented images and visual loops, it questions the relationship between the intimate and the exposed, between flesh as a vessel of life and as matter of representation.
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Le cauchemar de Dolly – video installation, presented as part of Algérie en création, Lyon and Galerie Regard Sud (2003).
Inspired by the cloning of Dolly the sheep, this installation explores the fear of an artificial reproduction of life. The work confronts the issues of duplication and the loss of authenticity, placing the viewer before deliberately unsettling images, verging on the monstrous.
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Passion – installation, XII Biennale of Young Artists of Europe and the Mediterranean, Naples (2005).
Here, the artist revisits the timeless theme of human passion, but through the lens of suffering and metamorphosis. Spectral silhouettes and altered images compose an atmosphere both mystical and disturbing, where emotion oscillates between fascination and unease.
Rabah OULD BRAHIM
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