Camille Soualem

Born 1993, lives and works in Marseille.

Camille Soualem’s practice is rooted in a political reflection on the body and its cultural inheritances, explored through painting, writing, and performance. By appropriating the codes of classical Western painting, in a gesture of inverted symbolic dispossession, she constructs images that contribute to the development of her own identity narrative. Through a thick materiality and at times a rough gesture, she develops a hybrid pictorial language, asserting a form of “bastardization” of painting. Her work seeks to restore a sense of agency to the figures of odalisques by endowing them with martial attributes. Her research has gradually expanded toward a more collective conception of the body, informed by decolonial thought and diasporic memory. Writing and poetry occupy a central place in her practice, appearing both in her paintings and performances, where they extend and permeate her pictorial gesture.

Camille Soualem graduated from the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2017. In 2018, she was awarded the Rose-Tapin Painting Prize. She held her first solo exhibition at La Corvée (Paris) in 2021. In 2022, she is an artist in residence at La Villa Belleville (Paris) and in 2023 and 2024 she presented solo exhibitions at exo exo (Paris) . She was a finalist for the Utopi.e Prize in 2025, dedicated to LGBTQIA+ artists, and presented her work in Marseille for the first time that same year as part of the exhibition To become 2, curated by Flora Fettah at Vidéochroniques. In 2026, she will participate in the exhibition Bonnes Mères, presented at the Mucem, which explores questions surrounding images and narratives associated with motherhood and the exhibition Des Mots et des Mondes, at Beaux-Arts de Paris, focused on practices relying on words and poetry.