Innocente is the second solo exhibition of the Franco-Algerian artist Dalila Dalléas Bouzar in Abidjan.

Opened on 12 December at Galerie Cécile Fakhoury, the artist blends the intimate and the social by grounding the criticism of the current status of women in a process between the empty and full spaces that form the basis of her plural identity.

In a new series of works, she continues to affirm her identity as a woman and a painter, while exploring the disappearance of her past. She is particularly interested in the themes of the pictorial representation of women as an assumption of power, transmission and female filiation.

In her works, Dalila Dalléas Bouzar expresses an ideal of the women’s status, reinvested with all their power, both real and magical. Innocent women, freed from the weight of the man’s body, which oppresses them symbolically and physically; freed from a fictitious fault to which they are constantly being driven by a patriarchal society. The word Innocente resonates strongly, as a hope, a struggle, a call.

The artist here continues her work of diverting the codes of Western painting, at the basis of her work, by shaking up the regimes of representation of the female body, through a series of paintings entitled Sorcières and the embroidered tapestry Adama, the main piece in the exhibition, created during a residency in Algeria. Through these works, Dalila Dalléas Bouzar invokes ancestral collective memories in order to infuse our imaginations with images of women transfigured by their own strength.