She certainly does not escape “definitions----and the representations we attach to them: from her face, she has the look of someone from the South Mediterranean; her name, Zoulikha evokes, to the Westerner, an indefinable Oriental exoticism, while her family name Bouabdellah sounds Arabic and probably Muslim; and when we learn that she was born in Moscow in 1967 to Algerian student parents, we attach to her vague notions of revolution, socialist sternness and atheism, plus education, of course. She also used to live in Aubervilliers, in one of those drab Paris suburbs home to the unruly immigrant youths who shook France in 2005. Yet, she is also French, her parents having found refuge in France in 1994, at the height of the Algerian civil war between Islamists and the ruling secular-minded military.
How does one live with such entangled layers of identity? By assuming all of them, Zoulikha, the Paris-based recipient of the Abraaj Capital Art Prize 2008/ Art Dubai 2009, tells and shows us, while at the same time liberating herself from the attitudes those identities wish to impress upon her. Be aware, and free!
“Of course I am Muslim,” she told this writer around a coffee at BANK gallery in Paris, several months ago,” Isn’t the Koran so beautiful. And of course I am proudly Algerian too, “she added, “Algeria is where my roots are, and I love Arabic culture; but don’t think I am not a daughter of the Republic; it is France that welcomed me and my family, and Liberté, Egalité and Fraternité are principles I hold dear; it is also in France that I was educated. Finally, I am also a woman, and a liberated one at that, whose partner is none other than a Christian Lebanese!”
Think of Croisé-f-Crossing, the piece of video-art that brought her the beginnings of fame at the Pompidou Museum in Paris, in 2005. The 5mn video opens with the close-up of a white-veiled Arabic woman----Zoulikha herself---looking at the camera, her head resting on an immaculate pillow. Her mouth too is shut by the veil. She slowly uncovers her mouth and, grimacing, painfully unrolls from it a long rosary. When she finally comes to the end of it, what does she pull out? A cross!
Zoulikha recalled how her video was received: “Many people wouldn’t understand. I had a hard time even with my Lebanese partner,” she said, “who perceived my show as an insult to Christianity”. Vomiting Christ at the end of a long historical process---the beads of time of the rosary is indeed one of the ways one can read it. As a metaphor for the liberation of the Arabic world from Western domination. Isn’t the title Croisée which in French is the feminine of “crusader”. “But orthodox Muslims were no less incensed,” added Zoulikah” They too saw it as an insult to their religion!” The woman was veiled after all, as Muslim women should be, shouldn’t they! And Zoulikha was raising the issue of the silenced women of Arabian lands! It was considered blasphemous, as shown by reactions from French Muslims in local newspapers.
But Zoulikha is undaunted: “What I was after in that work----what I am always after in any of my works—is not the scandal,” she said,” but the awareness. By provoking such an uproar, from both sides of the divide, what I questioned was the boundary of our identities, why do we react in this or that way, and does it truly make sense to react?” In other words, when Zoulikha highlights the issues that place the West at loggerheads with Islam, as she seems to do in several of her works, it is to expose their absurdity, and thus eventually brings about a sort of catharsis through which the very notions of West and Islam, and of identity in general are de-emphasized----instead of dramatized. It is at this stage that the title of the work, Croisée, takes on its second meaning: croisée also means Crossing, a crossing of cultures, people and ideas. By extension: exchange and openness. The divide is also a crossing, she tells us.
In the same vein as Croisée-f-Crossing, and resulting in the same misperception is an installation which Zoulikha made in 2007, Holly Hybrid. It consisted of an Arab tent in the back of which were pictures of the Holy Family (Jesus and his family) on its way back from Egypt. But the tent could be re-shaped so as to look like the Holy Kaaba of Mecca, where Ibrahim is said to have received his revelation. The Holy Family and the Holy Kaaba side by side. Contradiction and protests of blasphemy? Or an encounter between the two traditions and peace, as the title Holly Hybrid seems to suggest? Zoulikha makes both possible, even though she obviously leans more toward the second. In any case, she raises again the issue of the encounter of cultures.
In another video—Dansons 2003 (Let us Dance)-----Zoulikha challenges no less than traditional nationalism. Not only does she attack the religious bigots, but the old-time nationalists as well---of the French kind. Imagine a young woman’s exposed belly, and her hands slowly wrapping it up in three scarves, blue, white and red embroidered with glittering coins. The spectator has barely started to understand that the colors are those of the French flag when the music begins. And the belly now sways to what looks like the rhythm of an Arabic dance. The rhythm is slow, but there is an air of dej� vu. And indeed, while we look, transfixed, at her swaying navel, we become suddenly aware: the background music is not Arabic at all, it is the French national anthem, La Marseillaise, which has also long been the ultimate call for liberty for revolutionaries the world over. Yet, the Marseillaise is here less about marching and going to war than celebrating the cultural –and also, the belly tells us—the physical racial and ethnic mix that is reconfiguring France today. Should we add that Zoulikha claims that this work is inspired by another internationally recognized icon of liberty, that of Delacroix’s painting titled Liberty Leading the People, a homage to the 1830 revolution.
Such a work could not fail to shock the old-time bigots, those wary of the ethnic mutation that Western Europe has experienced. But it also challenges the expectations of other old-timers, the anti-colonialist warriors. To those who would like to see this particular work in the light of the conflicts that have existed between Algeria and France, she advises them to move on and look ahead: “The history of these two countries will link them for a long time to come,” she says.” I have no intention of championing antinomy. I prefer the idea of cohesion. The combination of belly dancing with the colors of the French flag is ...not necessarily risky or destined to fail, as might be said of couples who seem to be too different to be together.”[1] There is a message, in her works and words, for those who see in globalization only the hardening of identities. A message of hope.
Another issue her works contend with is that of the condition of women in Arab and Muslim cultures. In this peculiar matter, she does not want our perception of the Muslim woman to be reduced to that of a subjugated, veiled being –she is herself an illustration of the opposite----but, as a whole series of her works demonstrates, she is also definitely at odds with traditional Islamic values with regard to women. The attacks she launches may seem at first glance innocuous, but, as one enters their symbolic logic, they become devastating.
Look at her Silence installation (2008). What does it consist of? Muslim prayer mats with high-heel shoes. But upon a closer look, it appears that there are holes made in the prayer mat where the shoes are placed, and that the mats don’t all face the same direction ---not all face Mecca. How to decipher this? Isn’t she meaning that there are several roads to religion, and several interpretations to each religion. That women may be religious, but at the same time their femininity is creating “holes” in their religious practice. Thus with a few simple objects----shoes and mats---she manages to raise the issue of the relationship between women and religion in general, and Islam in particular.

Rouge et Noir (Red and Black), another of Zoulikha’s 2008 installations, is no less scathing. There, above a row of dark-veiled and black-faced women is a row of women’s garish pink bras. Women’s desires, and the women themselves are constructed as dark, she seems to tell us, hence they have to be veiled and shut off from male’s eyes, but their desires, although normally hidden (the bras), may nonetheless be wild. In other words, let women be the master of their own bodies, let not how they use them be determined by religious norms.
But the wildest of all her “feminist” works is undoubtedly: Minaret (2008). In this short video, one never sees the whole of the minaret, but only the upper part with the spike on top. A muffled noise comes up, from which one perceives only the words –Ah ma cherie (Ah, my darling, but closer in meaning to Oh, my God). The minaret is at the same time seen as if trembling. Lovemaking next to a minaret! Scandalous, perhaps, but it raises the issue of religion and sex, and of the limits of the control over one’s own body, regardless of social and religious norms.

These are some of the most audacious works of Zoulikha, but she is extraordinarily productive and has churned out many more, from parodies of classic male sculptures----which she transforms into female ones----to attacks on the Iraq war. Her CV is impressive: the Venice Biennale, the Pompidou Museum, the ArtDubai Abraaj art prize , the Mori Musuem in Tokyo, and the Brooklyn Museum in New York, etc. It already reads like that of a long established artist, even though she is only 32. She is indeed an important voice of the new rainbow cultures that are appearing the world over, in particular in the West with its Islamic and African communities and in the Muslim world with its tumultuous modernization. Everywhere she witnesses differences, borders, “otherness” and everywhere she consciously transgresses them, at times with naughtiness, and at other times in a damn serious way, but to her transgression is liberty, and liberty the broadening of one’s consciousness. It enables her to be French, Muslim, Algerian, and a liberated woman----free as a woman and free also from absolute French-ness, Islam-ness, Arab-ness and whatever else. Free enough anyway to see herself, and others, as members of a world without “otherness”. In the end, Zoulikha may well be today’s voice of a better future.