Ben Uri Research Unit

Born: 1949 Khemis Miliana, Algeria

Year of Migration to the UK: 1977

Biography

Artist Houria Niati was born to an Arab father and a Berber mother in Khemis-Miliana, Algeria (then a French colony) in 1943. Her father was an amateur landscape painter and their home was full of art books and paintings. Given paintbrushes from a young age, she later recalled, ‘I grew up with the idea that I was an artist,’ (Highet 2013). Throughout her childhood, she witnessed the brutalities of the Algerian war of independence, with the grim reality of people dying in the streets daily. Every night, the family sought refuge, hiding as windows shattered and bombs decimated their town. At the age of 12, Niati was arrested for inscribing graffiti hostile to France and for her participation in a demonstration. Only her attendance at a French school spared her from torture. Her dream of attending art school was dashed after her father’s sudden death from a heart attack. She subsequently worked for the Ministry of Youth in Algeria and travelled abroad to several countries, including Poland, France, and Tunisia.

Visiting England for the first time in 1975, Niati chose to return permanently in 1977 to pursue her chosen career in the arts. She studied at Croydon College of Art from 1979 to 1982, followed by an MA in Fine Art at Middlesex University. During this period, she kept hearing the term ‘ethnic’ and gradually realised that there was ‘no chance just to be an “artist”,’ (Highet 2013). Niati would later share that London afforded her ‘the possibility of looking at my life from far away,’ (STM, 2006). She was an important contributor to the rise of British Black women artists during the 1980s and 1990s, integrating into a network of Black female artists who were asserting their presence within mainstream art and the gendered and racialised Western canon. In 1983 she created an influential artwork, No to Torture, critiquing the French oppression of Algerian women during the colonial era and the War of Independence. The work deconstructed Delacroix’s iconic Les Femmes d’Alger Dans Leur Appartement (1834), taking inspiration from the brutal treatment of women under French rule and the way Delacroix’s piece was involved with this colonial violence. Niati also participated in the Five Black Women exhibition at London’s Africa Centre in 1983, which highlighted works by artists such as Lubaina Himid (also the curator), Claudette Johnson, Sonya Boyce, and Veronica Ryan. The following year, Niati's series, Delirium, featured in a solo exhibition at the same venue, marking a first for an Algerian artist. Central to the exhibition was a line from one of her poems: ‘The roses are incredible fishes. The fishes walk like humans,’ emphasising her profound connection to Surrealism. Figures reminiscent of human and animal masks floated over dreamlike landscapes, evoking Marc Chagall’s iconography. One critic captured the essence of her work, noting: ‘There is no perspective, only the warm, giddy sense of a brightly-lit frescoed cave,’ (cited in Highet 2013). Niati’s work was also included in the From Two Worlds exhibition at London’s Whitechapel Gallery in 1986 and in Four X 4, an exhibition of installations curated by Eddie Chambers, in Bristol’s Arnolfini Gallery in 1991

Niati's artistic practice encompasses oils, pastels, installations, and live performances of Arab-Andalusian songs. However, she is primarily known for mixed media installations that challenge the Western portrayal and commodification of North African and Middle Eastern women. Singing remains an important aspect of her life and also supplements her income, as she acknowledges that her earnings from art alone are insufficient (STM, 2006). Niati’s art reflects her diverse cultural legacy, particularly the Arab and Berber tales and oral histories shared by her grandmother. Niati has articulated that her art is a ‘visual explosion of the time, an interaction of ideas in space and time,’ bridging the past, present, and future in an endeavour to reconcile eastern and western identities (Artist’s website). Her work explores the multifaceted nature of ‘Algerian’ identity, and she concedes that Algeria faces challenges in forging a distinct identity. Further complicating her sense of self has been the imposed French education and language in Algeria, where she felt she and the other pupils were ‘brainwashed’ into thinking they were French (Artist’s website). The revered figures from Algerian and Islamic traditions that populate her work were inherited from the older women in her family, even as this heritage was disparaged at school. As Martin Elms observed, this offered a ‘conflicted but creative mix of different languages, genealogies, and cultural values in Niati’s work,’ (Elms 2019, p. 187).

In 2013, Niati celebrated three decades of her London career with the retrospective exhibition Identity Search at Conway Hall, London. Houria Niati currently lives and works in London, England. In the UK public domain her work is represented in the British Museum collection.

Related books

Martin Elms, Identity and Positioning in Algerian and Franco-Algerian Contemporary Art (MA Thesis, University of Sheffield, 2019)
Monica Blackmun Visona, Gitti Salami and Dana Arnold, A Companion to Modern African Art (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2013), p. 198
Abelina Galustian, Challenging Orientalist Representations: Houria Niati Reconfigures the Portrayal of Algerian Women (PhD Dissertation, University of California, 2007)
Sarah Rogers, ‘Houria Niati's No To Torture: A Modernist Reconfiguration of Delacroix's Women of Algiers in Their Apartment’, Thresholds, No. 24, 2002, pp. 36-41
Fran Lloyd, Displacement & Difference: Contemporary Arab Visual Culture in the Diaspora (London: Saffron Books, 2001)
Fran Lloyd, 'Embodiment and Performing the "Self" in Contemporary Algerian Art: Houria Niati and Zineb Sedira’, Journal of Algerian Studies, Vols. 4 and 5, 2000, pp. 59-78
Houria Niati, 'Diverse Bodies of Experiences', in Fran Lloyd ed., Contemporary Arab Women's Art: Dialogues of the Present (London: WAL, 1999)
Salah M. Hassan, ‘Nothing Romantic About It! A Critique of Orientalist Representation in the Installations of Houria Niati’, in Gendered Visions. The Art of Contemporary Africana Women Artists (Trenton: Africa World Press, 1997), pp. 9-18
Salah M. Hassan, ‘The Installations of Houria Niati’, Journal of Contemporary African Art, No. 3, 1995, pp. 50-55
Deirdre Figueiredo, Forms of Intuition: Sculptures by Franklyn Beckford - Paintings and Drawings by Houria Niati (Bradford: Cartwright Hall, 1989)
Rachel Kirby and Nicholas Serota, From Two Worlds, exh. cat. (London: Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1986)

Public collections

British Museum

Related organisations

Croydon College of Art (student)
Middlesex University (student)

Selected exhibitions

Houria Niati: No to Torture (solo exhibition), Felix and Spear, London (2023)
Identity Search (solo exhibition), Conway Hall, London (2013)
Allegories: A Quest for Search (solo exhibition), Watermans Arts Centre, Brentford, London (2011)
Four X 4 (group show), Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol (1991) and then travelling
Pastels and Paintings by Houria Niati (solo exhibition), Africa Centre, London (1988)
From Two Worlds (group show), Whitechapel Gallery, London (1986)
Third World Within: An Exhibition of the Work of Afro-Asian Artists in Britain (group show), Brixton Art Gallery, London (1986)
Delirium (solo exhibition), The Africa Centre, London (1984)
Black Woman Time Now (group show), Battersea Arts Centre, London (1983)
Five Black Women Artists , Sonia Boyce, Lubaina Himid, Claudette Johnson, Houria Niati, and Veronica Ryan (group show), Africa Centre, London (1983)

Ben Uri archive

Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Houria Niati]

Ben Uri Research Unit

for the study and digital recording of the Jewish, Refugee and wide Immigrant contribution to British visual culture since 1900.

Houria Niati artist