Houria Niati
MA Fine Art
Trained in Community Arts in Algeria, she settled in London in 1977 where she studied Fine Art at the Croydon College of Art. Recently, she completed MA Fine Art at Middlessex University. Niati has exhibited widely since 1983. Her installations include painting, digital arts, poetry and her live performances of Arab-Andalusian songs. Her most powerful installations -No To Torture ( based on deconstructing Delacroix's famous painting The Women of Algiers ), and Bringing Water from The Fountain Has Nothing Romantic About It, in which she explores Orientalist images and colonial postcards, have build her reputation. Her work is idiosyncratic, based on identity/dichotomy, displacement/multicultural environment and war issues.
Major touring exhibitions
From Two Worlds at the Whitechapel Gallery 1986, Forces of Changes USA 1994-95, Cross/ing: Time Space Movement (USA 1997-2000) and Dialogue of the Present, Arab Women Artists (Britain, 1999-2000).
2003/06 exhibitions include Harems and Fantasies at the CCCB Barcelona, Art of Celebration Kingston Museum, The 20th C in the Algerian Art at the Orangerie du Senat Paris, Autoportrait Interrogatif at Mamia Bretesche Galerie Paris. Breaking the Veil, Collection of the Royal Society of Art Jordan touring Greece, France, Spain and Italy.
2007: Live performance inclusive the British Museum and the Leighton House Museum London.
2008: Mediterraneo...a sea that unites, a group exhibition at the Italian Institute London.
2008-09: Breaking the Veil, touring the US, already shown at the Clinton Foundation, Little Rock. At the University of Southern Mississipi's College of arts and Letters. Currently showing at the Kennedy Centre Washington DC.
No to Torture - 1982.
Dichotomy - 2007.
Dis-Connected - 2007.
Prayers - 2007.
Haunted - 2007.
Lamento -2007.
Out of the Ashes - 2007.
Out of the Ashes 3 - 2007.
Out of the Ashes 4 - 2007.
Petra - 2007.
The future speaks - 2006.
The mutation - 2003.
Self-portrait - 2003.