Dr Katarzyna Falęcka is Lecturer in Art History at the School of Arts and Cultures, Newcastle University in the UK. She specializes in modern and contemporary art from Northern Africa, with a particular focus on questions of archives, memory and gender. Her first monograph Photographic Afterlives: Art, Archives and the Algerian War of Independence, which discusses the work of contemporary archival art from Algeria and its diasporas, will be published with Manchester University Press. Falęcka has published articles in journals including African Arts (2022) and Third Text (2023), contributed chapters to the Wiley Blackwell Companion to French Art (2025) and exhibition catalogues, and curated the Beyond Metaphor: Women and War exhibition at apexart in New York (2021). A recipient of fellowships at the John Kluge Center, Library of Congress, Washington DC; the Centre d’Études Maghrébines à Tunis, Tunis; the African Art Department, Free University Berlin, Berlin; and the Merian Centre for Advanced Studies in the Maghreb, Tunis, she is currently researching artistic exchanges and cultural transfers between the former Eastern Bloc and Northern Africa during the Global Cold War.
A few years after Algeria gained its independence from France in 1962, the artist Houria Niati (b. 1948) took up a position with the Ministry of Youth and Culture, where she taught painting, ceramics, and drawing to both adults and children. Art workshops were intended to help Algerians work through the trauma of the Algerian…
