Dr Connie Sjödin

My research covers North African modernist art and nationalism during the first decades of decolonisation. My thesis, covering the years from 1962 to 1992, argues that the Algerian art collective Aouchem played a central role in advancing a pluralist vision of the postcolonial nation. Their manifesto and artworks drew from the "popular arts" of the Maghreb -- the everyday expressions of Algeria's Amazigh, Andalusian, Ottoman, and Mediterranean histories -- to engender an expansive national identity "from below". Based on archival research, interviews with former members, and visual analysis of their artworks, my thesis joins the group’s aesthetics to various high points in Algeria’s socialist nation-building and Third Worldist ambitions. Yet it also reveals tensions between Aouchem’s nationalist project and other forms of identity, whether regional or gendered. I am currently developing my thesis into my first monograph of the Aouchem group, while also working as a researcher at the Pompidou Centre in Paris.

I have taught courses on Global Modernism(s), Abstract Art, and Methodologies of Art History at Oxford, and was previously a Junior Teaching Fellow at the Ashmolean Museum.