Ouassila Arras – Photos de famille, 2018

Carpets collected from the artist’s family and friends cover the gallery floor. Ouassila Arras grew up with these carpets in the living room of her family’s apartment in the Paris suburbs. Their patterns are so familiar, she says, that she experiences them as “family photographs”. By unpicking finished carpets thread by thread, Arras begins “from the end” in order to return to their source. The gesture evokes histories left unspoken between generations, where silence has interrupted the transmission of memory. Traditionally, carpet designs drew on the geometry of Persian gardens, translating cultivated landscapes into the domestic interior. Here, that relationship is reversed. The carpets resemble an aerial view of cultivated terrain. Crossing the installation means moving through a fragile yet resilient family history, where French and Algerian memories remain interwoven, even as the threads that bind them begin to come apart.

Ouassila Arras’ practice is rooted in histories that remain unwritten, or only partially told: those of displaced bodies, interrupted narratives, and memories held at a distance. Drawing on family fragments, humble materials, and everyday objects, she creates forms that resist the neutrality of the gaze and emerge from spaces of silence. In the wake of Franco-Algerian histories, her work engages with questions of war, exile, assimilation, and survival.