
Neïla Czermak Ichti & Baya, “Rien ne me manque”, 2024. Exhibition view, “La Fleur et la Force”, 1re Contemporaine de Nîmes, “Une nouvelle jeunesse”, April 5 – June 23, 2024. Photo © Jean-Christophe Lett. Courtesy Galerie Anne Barrault, Paris.
When memory slips away, some traces remain. Those that Neïla Czermak Ichti has gathered in her sketchbooks and diaries strive, against all odds, to resist oblivion. Her artistic practice is driven by a quiet urgency — not to indulge in nostalgia, but to preserve and amplify these fragments through art, as an act of remembrance.
Who is granted the right to be remembered? What are the conditions for commemoration? It is against the injustice of forgetting that her lines rise up — lines that shape and reshape the figures she brings back to life in her drawings, sculptures, and textile or painted compositions.
The new body of work she will unveil at the Palais de Tokyo in June 2026 is rooted in memories of childhood and home — places she seeks to honour as much as to heal. Through her creations, Czermak Ichti conjures hybrid monsters and chimeras: beings that might seem unsettling at first glance, but ultimately offer solace, protection, and repair.
In the haunted house of dreams, memories, and struggles that the art centre will become for this exhibition, these animate figures will take center stage in a story that hovers between autobiography, reverie, and nightmare.
