Huda Takriti



  1. On Another Note
  2. Revisitation. In Three Acts
  3. Clarity is the Closest Wound to the Sun
  4. Notes on/for a Film
  5. Fluid Grounds I
  6. Fluid Grounds II
  7. Against Nostalgia
  8. Refusing to Meet Your Eye
  9. Of Cities and Private Living Rooms
  10. Les Yeux Dans Les Yeux
  11. The Euphoric Nights in Vienna: Here and Elsewhere
  12. Starry Nights
  13. A Storytelling; I only wish I could be there...

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Turning Narratives: In Rehearsal

by: Andrea Popelka

Huda Takriti’s exhibition Turning Narratives: In Rehearsal explores two interconnected bodies of work. Both the presented video and the series of photographs involve the act of looking at and handling images. They probe the status of images by posing questions such as: How do images come to represent history? What can be done with them, especially if they were created to serve a colonial regime? Could such images be turned against themselves? And, most importantly: Could these images—an overlooked weak signal in them, a detail that points beyond the frame—become vehicles for traveling back in time and re-opening the past? > read more


(In)verso. Between the Lens and the Archive

by: Rashmi Viswanathan

What do we ask of images?
Through video and collaged installations that feature her mother’s and grandmother’s photographs, stories, and prized things, Huda Takriti meditates on the nature of familial memory and knowledge production as women’s practice. She narrates the memories of her mother and grandmother, as generational knowledge still unfolding. Both her mother’s and her grandmother’s hands appear again and again in the video On Another Note (2024), holding scissors that cut fabric, turning the pages of photo albums, and gesturing as they explain. Her mother’s hands, captured by her daughter, link generations, bodies thousands of miles apart, and the knowledge they carry.

Ana de Almeida, in turn, examines family photographs—pictures from her father’s youth, taken alternately in his home country of Portugal and as a student in communist Czechoslovakia, between the years after the Carnation Revolution (1974) and just before the Velvet Revolution (1989). The images are filled with revolutionary fervor and empty of fixed archival documentation, leaving them open to the artist’s extra-historical and open-ended interpretations. They become hosts to the artist’s conceptions. De Almeida amplifies the presence of the family “shoebox of images,” so to speak. > read more



Rewinding(s). In Rehearsal

by: Gudrun Ratzinger

Huda Takriti: Who collected these photographs in this album—you or your mother?
Souheir Takriti: No, this was in an album for family photographs, but I replaced them and collected her work photos in one place.

The beginning of a narrative is always of great interest for historical studies. It specifies what the story is about, as it distinguishes what remains anterior to and outside the narrative and what constitutes the core of the story. “Especially in the narrative reconstruction of conflicts,” says literary theorist Albrecht Koschorke, “the question of where to begin has decisive consequences, for the respective starting point is a kind of meter of the injustice inflicted on a conflict party, which legitimizes their resistance.”* Huda Takriti begins her three-channel installation On Another Note (2024) with the sounds of a rainforest and landscape details from the cover of a photo album decorated with Asian lacquer painting. Her mother, Souheir Takriti, keeps photos of her mother—Hikmat al-Habbal—in this album, which show her as a teacher and successful textile artist in Kuwait in the 1960s. > read more


Between Memory and Opacity: (Post)colonial Archives and Mediated Images

by: Claudia Slanar

The “entrance” to the exhibition probably looks familiar: the postcard motif of a landscape with palm trees, greatly enlarged and affixed to the wall like wallpaper. The large image refers to the fashion for exoticizing interiors, which can presumably be traced back to the early colonial era and also pops up again and again today. Here, however, the motif is not merely a backdrop but frames the first photograph in Huda Takriti’s series Against Nostalgia. In nine photographs, the artist processes a collection of postcards with “orientalist” views of Algeria, which she found in the course of her research and bought at auction on eBay. They are indications of a postcolonial nostalgia for the colonial era, as traded on Instagram and through the Facebook accounts of the Pieds-Noirs, the former French settlers in Algeria, many of whom went back to France after the country’s declaration of independence. Depictions of the “former homeland”— sometimes with nostalgic titles such as “Scenes from the Orient” or “Back to Algeria”— alternate with exoticizing and sexualized depictions of women, recreated in photo studios to fit the white, European fantasies of the colonialists.
> read more