Born in 1976 in Algiers, Amina Menia still lives and works there. She graduated from Ecole Supérieure des Beaux-Arts of Algiers.
Amina Menia’s work questions the relation to architectural and historical spaces, and challenges conventional notions around the exhibition space. Her artworks are crossovers of sculptures and installations that trigger an interaction of viewers and passersby with socio-spatial configurations.
Extra-Muros (2005-ongoing) is a series of site specific installations all over Algiers. An invitation to revisit this city and thus its re-appropriation. It encountered so many obstacles that most of its chapters remain unrealised. Therefore, it intersects directly with its problematic of denouncing confiscated spaces, confiscated memory and lack of freedom.
For Chrysanthemums (2009-2011), she proposed a photographic installation in frontal relation with the viewer and documenting useless monuments charged with history.
Enclosed (2012-ongoing) is a documentary-based installation that shows how the Algerian artist M’hamed Issiakhem circumvented his commission to “hide” the former Monument to the Dead of Algiers. He encased it in a temporary cement coffering.
She is currently in residency in Marseille, working on the common architectural heritage of Algiers and Marseille through the inspiring figure of the architect Fernand Pouillon.
Amina has showed her work nationally and internationally, including Museum of Modern Art (Algiers), Cornerhouse (Great Britain), Museum of Contemporary Art (Leon), Royal Hibernian Academy (Dublin) and the National Museum of Carthage (Tunisia).