Lettrist Photography - Loeve&Co

Artist Frédérique Devaux Yahi shares how her photography blends the European avant-garde with her Kabyle roots. Frédérique Devaux Yahi develops, alongside her cinematic work, an artistic practice rooted in the field of Lettrism. Her visual work is built on a particular attention to the sign, rhythm, and the materiality of the image, drawing both from Lettrist research and from a cultural sensibility deeply shaped by her Kabyle roots. Her work is part of a non-Western approach to representation, in which the repetition of the sign, frontality, and symbolic inscription echo the visual traditions of North Africa and, more broadly, African arts—particularly in their relationship to the sign, the body, and space. Frédérique Devaux Yahi’s Lettrist photographic works, produced mainly between 1981 and 1991, have been presented in numerous group exhibitions dedicated to Lettrism, both in France and internationally. These presentations have helped to highlight a body of work in which formal experimentation engages in dialogue with extra-Western cultural heritages, asserting an aesthetic that is both radical and grounded. Through her artistic practice, Frédérique Devaux Yahi proposes a singular articulation between the European avant-garde and North African cultural memories, situating her work within an expanded history of contemporary art—one that is attentive to the circulation between cultures, to symbolic forms, and to visual languages emerging from the African continent and its diaspora. Moderator Frédéric Acquaviva, Curator Panellist Frédérique Devaux Yahi, Artist