Neïla Czermak Ichti

Neïla Czermak Ichti (1996, France) is a visual artist. Based in Marseille, she depicts intimate scenes—a meal, a nap, a conversation—in which her friends and family appear surrounded by strange creatures. Her canvases blend line drawing and painting to bring the real world together with monsters and hybrid figures drawn from horror films or folk tales. These fantastical beings are not threatening: they act as guardians who protect family secrets and visually convey the memories and emotions passed down from generation to generation.

Her collaborative residency project with Ibrahim Meïté Sikely aims to merge these two worlds to create works produced jointly by both artists, in the form of large-scale paintings and self-published books. They hope to combine their research to demonstrate how the imagination can serve as a tool for political and social resistance. By blending their techniques and references, they invent a new visual language that transforms inner worlds into collective narratives, capable of offering an alternative vision of history.