Ammar Bouras is a contemporary artist living and working in Algiers.

A former student of the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts d'Alger, exhibiting in Algeria and abroad for some twenty years, he complemented his training with a photographic practice that would give his work a new dimension and a new momentum.

trained as a painter, he then very quickly evolved his painting toward the integration and manipulation of photography, producing hybrid "photo-paintings" with a complex and varied visual language — among the first works of this kind in Algeria.

This work has today led to hybrid multimedia installations, where video and photography are often arranged as walls of moving images, restless video sequences, or mosaics…

This photographic activity, which he began at the end of his studies at the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts d'Alger and practiced from the 1990s onward against a backdrop of tragic current events, plunged him directly into a political and social context that pushed him to capture the reality of everyday society. This is why his works are always at the crossroads of the aesthetic, the social, and the political. Questions of power (and powers), tolerance, the individual and the self, betrayal, the violence of human relationships — in short, the pain of living and of the human condition — inhabit his images as a haunting leitmotif that keeps returning, like a permanent need to make visible the necessity of speaking out: video, the medium that imposed itself on him in the logic of his aesthetic path, became the preferred vehicle for his discourse: «Stridences, sangcommenttaire?», «Un Aller simple», «Serment»… This quest, which has guided his work since the dramatic 1990s, unfolds on screens where hard, ordinary lives coexist in chaotic, strident cities, against a backdrop of political and social news made banal by its tragedy, with images most often drawn from his own archives.

Ammar Bouras is today one of the very few Algerian artists living in Algeria who engage directly with reality and take a critical approach to politics and its social effects. The success of his work is certainly linked to this characteristic, which also reflects the convictions and commitment visible from the outset in his practice: he is currently one of the Algerian artists most present on the local art scene, and among the Algerian artists most sought after in international art venues. His work has been shown in major venues, including the MUCEM (Marseille), the Institut du Monde Arabe (Paris), the Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, and the Museum of Modern Art in Dublin. His work is held in museums in Asia (Iran), Africa (Mali), and across the Arab world, as well as in international private collections.