ABOUT
BIO
Arilès de Tizi is a multidisciplinary visual artist whose practice explores exile, migration, memory, and the reimagining of identity across cultures. His work moves between painting, photography, installation, film, and digital media, forging a visual language that bridges intimate histories with broader collective narratives.
Born in Hussein Dey, Algiers in 1984, he migrated to France in the early 1990s during the Algerian civil war. Raised in the working-class neighborhoods of Aubervilliers and Belleville, Paris, he was first immersed in graffiti and photography before developing a self-taught multidisciplinary practice that expanded into painting, sculpture, and installation. His trajectory reflects a continuous negotiation between displacement and belonging, between personal memory and political history. Today, he lives and works between Paris, New York, and Tokyo, situating his work within an international dialogue that challenges dominant narratives of identity and representation.
ARTISTIC APPROACH
Arilès de Tizi’s work emerges at the intersection of the sacred and the urban. He fuses devotional codes — reliquaries, funerary architecture, liturgical forms — with contemporary portraiture and visual languages drawn from street culture. Migrant bodies, anonymous figures, and everyday presences are elevated into monumental icons, transforming stories of marginalization into symbols of collective survival and resilience. His practice is both poetic and political: an act of re-inscription that dismantles inherited colonial mythologies while opening new spaces for memory, dignity, and visibility.