Artist in Residence, Stockholm, 3 June 2024 – 28 August 2024

Hichem Merouche (b.1991 in Tunis) is an artist based in Algeria and Greece. Merouche’s practice probes colonial ruin, national and religious apparatus and contemporary pan-Arab imaginary. His work integrates film, sound, photography, transformed objects and multilingual publications, in installations that directly connect to his personal life itinerary, spanning identity, faith, poetry and forms of survival within complex structures of authority.

Photo: Camille Ramanana Rahary

Hichem Merouche. Photo: Camille Ramanana Rahary.

During his residency at IASPIS, Merouche will launch research for a new body of work, editing an extensive archive of messages he captured inside the Jardin d’Essais – the botanical garden of Algiers. These messages, irreversibly engraved by visitors on tree-skins include tributes, love declarations, political messages, and other to-be-deciphered pictograms, that the artist compiled in form of photographs. Parallel to that, he aims to setup his studio to invite Stockholm based migrants to informally converse about aspiration, departure, adulthood, arabness and absence.

Merouche’s first solo exhibition Friendly Islands, opened in rhizome (2023). His work was included in: The Possibility of Not Having Been, Santa Monica Art Center, Barcelona (2023); En Attendant Omar Gatlato: Epilogue, Le Magasin, Grenoble (2023); Archives des luttes de femmes en Algérie, Documenta 15, Kassel (2022); Publishing Maneuvers Symposium, 421 Arts Campus, Abu Dhabi (2020); Partir avec les murs, Fondation Louis-Moret, Martigny (2018) and FIDMarseille, France (2018). Artist residencies include: Triangles Astérides, Marseille, (2022), Le Cube, Rabat, (2019) and Les Ateliers Sauvages, Algiers (2018).