The Shadow Œuvre: the secret art of Mohammed Racim

9 January 2025 from 6pm to 8pm in the conference room of the Maison des Astronomes.

How can we illuminate the Islamic arts of the Maghreb during the imperial era?

What do we really know about North African artists in the era of high imperialism? Using Mohammed Racim as an example, this talk will explore the ways in which vast ‘works of the shadows’ were produced anonymously, even by the best-known Algerian artists. We know Mohammed Racim as the creator of reinvented forms of illuminated miniature that appealed widely to Algerian and French audiences, but what might it mean to discover that these works were overshadowed by the production of popular Islamic art forms that were widely consumed in pre-war Algeria?

This public lecture will be given in French by William Gallois. He is the guest of Robert Gleave, holder of the Averroes: Mediterranean Islam – Amidex/Iméra Chair (Mediterranean research programme).

William Gallois is Professor of the Islamic Mediterranean at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter (UK). He is the author of Qayrawān – The Amuletic City (Penn State University Press, 2024), The History of Violence in the Early Algerian Colony (Palgrave, 2014) and contributions to francophone journals such as Les Temps Modernes and Maghreb-Machrek.