Maya Inès Touam is a Franco-Algerian visual artist and photographer, born in 1988 in Paris. She lives and works between Paris and Aubervilliers, and currently resides in the Poush artists’ studios in Aubervilliers.
A graduate of the Beaux-Arts in Paris, her work has been exhibited in numerous institutions, galleries, and foundations in France and internationally, and is included in public and private collections such as the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and Huis Marseille in Amsterdam. Her work has also been featured in international festivals, including the Rencontres de la Photographie in Arles, the Tasweer Photo Festival (Doha), and the Lagos Photo Festival. She is also involved in educational activities and has been invited to research and production residencies in Senegal, Benin, and Marrakech. In 2025, she collaborates with the Musée du Quai Branly.
Maya Inès Touam's work is a game of association and deconstruction between cultures—Western, Eastern, Pan-African—born of her Mediterranean family heritage. She questions the destination of images, as well as their origins, in a practice of decentering. Through displacement and filiation, she uses her photography to recondition a terrestrial, historical, and memorial compass by combining still life with living species and questions.
In two dimensions as well as in volume, the photographer weaves a dialogue between photographic techniques and tools in their relationship to their environment, to domestic objects as well as furniture. It is this attention that gives her her status as a visual artist.
In her photographic tableaux, Maya Inès Touam brings together hundreds, sometimes thousands, of studio shots and, through juxtaposition, composes new hybrid narratives that pay homage to and reference her origins and art history. She combines objects with beliefs, confronts the popular with the sacred, and mixes languages and customs, like a child who builds or an adult who deconstructs. Drawing on historical pictorial movements, she traverses time and color frequencies to create scenes that stretch societal misunderstandings inherited from the past and mobilized by the contemporary world— heritage translocation, colonialism, creolization.
Her images wrestle the poetry of tense tales from reality.
