Fayçal Baghriche

Fayçal Baghriche (b. 1972, Skikda, Algeria) is a French-Algerian artist based in Paris who works in performance, installation, video and photography. His practice began with performance videos made in public space, using his own body. He also makes sculpture, most lately glazed porcelain and stoneware figurines that he sculpts, casts and refires himself.

The Message Project is a video built from Moustapha Akkad's 1977 film The Message. It splices the Arabic and English versions into one bilingual dialogue. Imperfections (2010) is a set of faulty industrial glass panes. A framer had marked them with felt-tip pen to stop their use, and Baghriche framed them as works. The Village (2026) is a group of ceramic sculptures modelled on fèves, the small figurines hidden in the galette des rois. He chose cheap fèves with production flaws, such as misaligned eyes and mould seams, and enlarged them to the scale of a face. Works include La Vierge (The Virgin) in porcelain and Le Chameau (The Camel) in stoneware.

Baghriche studied at Villa Arson, Nice (1991), and took an MA in multimedia creation (2001) at the National School of Fine Arts, Paris. Solo exhibitions include Subjective Projections at the Bielefelder Kunstverein (2010) and Short Films at Delfina Foundation, London (2012). Another was Night of the Doubt at Galerie Jérôme Poggi, Paris (2016). He showed in The Future of a Promise, a collateral exhibition of the 54th Venice Biennale (2011). He also took part in the Gwangju Biennale (2012) and the Dakar Biennale (2014). Group shows took his work to the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2018), and MuCEM, Marseille (2021). Collections include the Centre Pompidou, the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Barjeel Art Foundation and the Zayed National Museum. He is represented by Taymour Grahne Projects.