I work with absences that insist...
Lola Khalfa is a photographer and visual artist whose work traces the invisible fractures left by political erasure and displacement. Born in Annaba, Algeria, and now based in Marseille, she explores how absence is spatially staged — in waiting rooms, in unfinished architecture, in blurred portraits of those who stayed or left.
Rooted in her experience of internal exile during Algeria’s Black Decade, and shaped by a lineage of activism and silence, her practice navigates the spaces where memory disintegrates — both personal and collective. Working with photography, archives, and vernacular images, she does not aim to reconstruct what was lost, but to reveal what lingers beneath the surface.
Her images do not document — they haunt. Her poetic and precise method is observing how political violence sediments itself into gestures, voids, and domestic spaces. Across each project, she resists spectacle, preferring the slow choreography of erasure and reappearance.
Her work has been exhibited at the Arab World Institute (Paris), the Museum of Modern Art of Algiers, and La Friche la Belle de Mai (Marseille), and it has been supported by the Arab Documentary Fund, the Prince Claus Fund, and the Magnum Foundation.
For inquiries, please email me at lola.khalfaa@gmail.com