Tiohtià:ke/Montréal
London
Alger
Paris
Berirouche Feddal
studio@berirouche.ca

Born in Rouiba in 1996 and raised between Algiers and Irdjen, his parents’ Kabyle village, Berirouche Feddal was ten when he landed in Pointe-aux-Trembles, at the eastern tip of Tiohtià:ke. He now works between Montréal, London and Algiers, and is pursuing an MFA at Goldsmiths. His practice is a souk where nothing settles: abstract and figurative, object and performance, war and colour, Pan-Africanism and its violence. Stadium chants become protest songs; gold and wheat ask to be worshipped. He works with what time leaves behind: rusted objects, henna rusting in the elders' hair, relics of childhood that hide inherited horrors. Kardoune, devotional symbols and burned wood carry the voices of parents and villagers, the afterlives of colonial history, the ghosts that refuse to leave. His colour began underfoot, on his grandmother's carpets. His work talks to the dead, leaves space empty, and allows itself to forget.

CV


PRESS
Dans les plis du souvenir, les couleurs se taisentVie des arts, no. 279, Winter 2025VisitesText: Dounia Bouzidi
Fleurs fanées: Anna Binta Diallo et Berirouche FeddalVie des arts, no. 275, Summer 2024Créations
L'art de recycler des bouts de muséeLe Devoir, April 24, 2024Text: Stéphane Baillargeon
La révolution des couleursLe Devoir, March 30, 2024Text: Amélie RevertPhoto: Adil Boukind
Dans l'atelier de Berirouche FeddalEsse arts + opinions, no. 110, AgricultureText: Nicholas DawsonPhotos: Alexandra Dumais
VIDEOS
▶ Play
la clarté creuse les montagnes, 2026Musée d'art de JolietteCurated by Ariane De BloisWith asinnajaq, Nathalie Batraville, Stina Baudin, Amanda Boulos, Shannon Garden-Smith, Frantz Patrick Henry and Tyson Houseman
▶ Play
Afrotopos, 2025Stewart Hall GalleryCurated by Diane GistalWith Damien Ajavon, Delali Cofie, Anna Binta Diallo, Marie-Danielle Duval, ibiyanε and Roxane Mbanga
▶ Play
Textile Beyond Craft, 2023Round table: Reflections on the Montreal SceneCentre de design UQAMModerated by Christina ContandriopoulosWith Édith-Anne Pageot and Michaëlle Sergile
▶ Play
Spoliation du souk, 2022Conseil des arts de MontréalCurated by Michelle Caron and Colas Eko
PODCAST
Conjuguer les identités qui nous habitentIn/Tension, The Power Plant, 2023Hosted by Diane GistalWith Anna Binta Diallo42 min
▶ Listen
Dans les plis du souvenir, les couleurs se taisent 2025

Maison de la culture du Plateau-Mont-Royal
Montréal, Canada
June 19 – August 24, 2025

↓ Exhibition textCurated by Alexandre Potvin
Photos: Guy L’Heureux
Vie des arts · McBride Contemporain
Dans les plis du souvenir, les couleurs se taisentInstallation view, Maison de la culture du Plateau-Mont-Royal, Montréal, 2025Curated by Alexandre PotvinPhoto: Guy L’Heureux
Arme tendue, récit fané2025Glass bottle, dried bougainvillea petals104 × 20 × 10 cmBehind: Printemps en lamentation, les couleurs en damnation, 2024Photo: Guy L’Heureux
Dans les plis du souvenir, les couleurs se taisentInstallation view, Maison de la culture du Plateau-Mont-Royal, Montréal, 2025Curated by Alexandre PotvinPhoto: Guy L’Heureux
Dans les plis du souvenir, les couleurs se taisentInstallation view, Maison de la culture du Plateau-Mont-Royal, Montréal, 2025Curated by Alexandre PotvinPhoto: Guy L’Heureux
Dans les plis du souvenir, les couleurs se taisentInstallation view, Maison de la culture du Plateau-Mont-Royal, Montréal, 2025Curated by Alexandre PotvinPhoto: Guy L’Heureux
Dans les plis du souvenir, les couleurs se taisentInstallation view, Maison de la culture du Plateau-Mont-Royal, Montréal, 2025Curated by Alexandre PotvinPhoto: Guy L’Heureux
Les silences de l’Humanité, résonance d’une bonté oubliée2024Wood engraving and oil pastel122 × 82.5 cmPhoto: Guy L’Heureux
Dans les plis du souvenir, les couleurs se taisentInstallation view, Maison de la culture du Plateau-Mont-Royal, Montréal, 2025Curated by Alexandre PotvinPhoto: Guy L’Heureux
Mémoires d’une Double Hache2024Metal bed, oxidized metal sheets, beads with Fatima eyes, kardoune, Farez Aldjia carpet, cushion and cotton threads254 × 289.5 cmBehind: Palimpseste, résistance des récits déchirés, 2024, painted on a wall panel from the Musée d’art contemporain de MontréalPhoto: Guy L’Heureux
Dans les plis du souvenir, les couleurs se taisentInstallation view, Maison de la culture du Plateau-Mont-Royal, Montréal, 2025Curated by Alexandre PotvinPhoto: Guy L’Heureux
La terre fume. Les prières tombent2025Engraving, wood burning and paint on wood panel244 × 355 cmLeft: Recueillement en hymne de joie, 2025Photo: Guy L’Heureux
Dans les plis du souvenir, les couleurs se taisentInstallation view, Maison de la culture du Plateau-Mont-Royal, Montréal, 2025Curated by Alexandre PotvinPhoto: Guy L’Heureux
Dans les plis du souvenir, les couleurs se taisentInstallation view, Maison de la culture du Plateau-Mont-Royal, Montréal, 2025Curated by Alexandre PotvinPhoto: Guy L’Heureux
Dans les plis du souvenir, les couleurs se taisentInstallation view, Maison de la culture du Plateau-Mont-Royal, Montréal, 2025Curated by Alexandre PotvinPhoto: Guy L’Heureux
Dans les plis du souvenir, les couleurs se taisentInstallation view, Maison de la culture du Plateau-Mont-Royal, Montréal, 2025Curated by Alexandre PotvinPhoto: Guy L’Heureux
Les Veilleuses / The Watchers / Ameskar / ⴰⵎⴻⵙⴽⴰⵔ / الحارسات2025Kardoune, natural hair dyed with hennaVariable dimensionsPhoto: Guy L’Heureux
Dans les plis du souvenir, les couleurs se taisentInstallation view, Maison de la culture du Plateau-Mont-Royal, Montréal, 2025Curated by Alexandre PotvinPhoto: Guy L’Heureux
Dans les plis du souvenir, les couleurs se taisentInstallation view, Maison de la culture du Plateau-Mont-Royal, Montréal, 2025Curated by Alexandre PotvinPhoto: Guy L’Heureux
Forehead Kiss No. 10, No. 8 and No. 92022Inkjet prints101.5 × 81.5 cm; 106 × 80 cm; 101.5 × 81.5 cmPhoto: Guy L’Heureux
Dans les plis du souvenir, les couleurs se taisentInstallation view (detail), Maison de la culture du Plateau-Mont-Royal, Montréal, 2025Curated by Alexandre PotvinPhoto: Guy L’Heureux
Dans les plis du souvenir, les couleurs se taisentInstallation view, Maison de la culture du Plateau-Mont-Royal, Montréal, 2025Curated by Alexandre PotvinPhoto: Guy L’Heureux
La jarre est pleine de silence2025Kardoune sculpture and Kabyle pottery22 × 28 × 20 cmBehind: Forehead Kiss No. 13, 2022Photo: Guy L’Heureux
La jarre est pleine de silence2025Kardoune sculpture and Kabyle pottery22 × 28 × 20 cmPhoto: Guy L’Heureux
La jarre est pleine de silence2025Kardoune sculpture and Kabyle pottery22 × 28 × 20 cmPhoto: Guy L’Heureux


Exhibition text


Alexandre Potvin, curator
Translated from the French

↑ Back to imagesDans les plis du souvenir, les couleurs se taisent is a political gesture. Not one of protest, but through its capacity to activate an embodied, sensory, unspectacular memory.

Some works resonate with contemporary scenes: entire neighbourhoods wiped off the map, trapped childhoods, territories left to suffocate. A methodical, repeated violence that grinds down landmarks and the living alike. Faced with this reality, artists often have only precarious but essential gestures: an image, a symbol, a transformed material. In this fragility lies a form of resistance, unspectacular yet deeply political.

Some silences do not disappear; they seep into objects, skin and gestures. Berirouche Feddal enters memory through damaged materials: wax, pastel, engraved wood, henna-dyed hair, burned textiles, dried bougainvillea. A way of giving existence to what has been silenced and censored. The exhibition offers a porous space, not for looking, but for feeling.

Conceived as a sensory path, the exhibition unfolds across two thresholds, a before and an after. It explores the erosion of time, exile, figures of martyrdom and the destruction of old equilibriums. These balances, between the dead and the living, between the soil and the sacred, were once preserved by agrarian gestures, Indigenous knowledge, and oral and silent transmission.

Today, only fragments remain. The colours fall silent, not because they have nothing to say, but because they have seen too much.

It begins outside. Children in French-language classes, their families, and adults seeking refuge took part in cyanotype workshops. Their images are stapled to a large wooden panel, left in the sun, offered to Montréal’s summer weather. They are not ornaments. They are a visual prayer, fragile and collective. A reminder that life’s lottery does not hand out peace in equal shares.

The first room opens onto a wound of memory: Mohamed Bouazizi, the mourning of childhood, streets stained with the blood of sacrificed animals. Personal narratives come apart and freeze into an intergenerational silence. Sacrifice is no longer an offering, but an echo of memory.

The poem Indifférence, written by the artist’s father in 1975, is shown in its original version, alongside several versions left out in the weather during the summer of 2024, for the solo exhibition Les larmes nourrissent le bleu méditerranéen at L’Imagier. Together, these poetic fragments reflect the artist’s ongoing search for a visual language able to pass through the layers of time and pain. Nothing is decorative. Everything is a position.

The end of this first room closes in on the family body: a rusted bed, a cast of the artist’s body reaching toward a wax sheep’s head, a grandmother’s rug. This is where memory takes on a body, becoming fabric, flower, graphite and dust. Bougainvillea petals are preserved inside a resin head. Fragments of Matisse become the pretext for a work torn from the wall of the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal on the last day before its interior demolition in 2024. Here the blue is not Mediterranean: it is electric, and it resists.

Visitors then enter the second part of the exhibition, where the progression of the artist’s research becomes palpable, even immersive. Draped in black, it holds Les Veilleuses, suspended between sky and ground, made of kardoune and hair: a tribute to Kabyle women who have no monuments. A glass rifle filled with dried flowers. A memory of Algiers and of a souk on fire. An eight-foot engraving of the artist’s grandmother, shortly before her death. A smell of burned wood. A warm light, like a lamp left on while we sleep.

On the wall, a work twelve feet by eight: worn surfaces scorched with a blowtorch, crossed by erased forms. Colonial enfumades and censorship, reflecting the fragmented cartography of necropolitics. What is not commemorated is held back. What cannot be said becomes smell, trace and ash.

Dans les plis du souvenir, les couleurs se taisent is an attempt at transmission. A memory held in suspension, which each visitor carries through the exhibition, even without realizing it. It is in this fragility that a form of resistance lies, one that does not seek to convince, but to awaken what can no longer be ignored.

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