Art & Culture

The Confused Arab Comes Home With ‘Alger Capitale’

BYKhaoula Ghanem

August 10, 2026

“J’habite une ville si candide / Qu’on l’appelle Alger la Blanche.” So begins Anna Gréki’s Algérie, capitale Alger, a poem in which Algiers appears almost impossibly luminous. Whitewashed buildings descend toward the Mediterranean, while sea, sky and city dissolve into shades of blue. Eventually, Gréki arrives at another name for the city: El-Djezaïr.

Born Colette Anna Grégoire in Batna in 1931, Gréki grew up in the Aurès Mountains and was descended from European settlers, yet identified deeply with Algeria and joined its struggle for independence from French colonial rule. A member of the Algerian Communist Party, she was arrested by French authorities in 1957 and imprisoned for her political activity. Algérie, capitale Alger, much of which was written during her imprisonment, was published in 1963, one year after Algeria gained independence.

More than six decades later, Sofiane Si Merabet borrows its name for Alger Capitale, his photography and poetry exhibition running from Aug. 7 to 11 at Jidar Gallery on Rue Didouche Mourad in central Algiers. It is Si Merabet’s first exhibition in the Algerian capital, making the choice of Gréki especially fitting for an artist whose family roots lie in Algeria but whose life has spread out across different geographies.

Better known as The Confused Arab to his 96.8K Instagram followers, Si Merabet has built a cultural platform around precisely the sometimes contradictory experience of contemporary Arab identity across diaspora, language, and memory. Those questions became the subject of his 2024 book, L’Arabe Confus, and here they become spatial.

Alger Capitale pairs photography with poetry in Arabic, French, and English across five cities: Algiers, Beirut, Cairo, Dubai and Jeddah. Conceived around the structure between the alphabet and Arabic abjadiya, each city operates almost like a letter within an unfinished sentence about what being Arab can mean today.

In Algeria especially, language can never be an entirely neutral choice. French carries the history of 132 years of colonial rule; Arabic carries its own relationship to post-independence nation-building; Tamazight complicates any easy equation between Algerian and Arab identity. Si Merabet’s trilingualism does not resolve these tensions so much as inhabit them. Even the title moves between Alger, the French name inherited from colonial history, and الجزائر, Al-Jazā’ir.

The exhibition also spills beyond the walls. On Aug. 8, Si Merabet sat down with historian Todd Shepard, a scholar of Algeria and decolonization at Johns Hopkins University, for a public conversation on modern Arab identity and the questions raised in L’Arabe Confus. Throughout the five-day run, Jidar has also been transformed into something closer to a temporary cultural meeting point, with limited-edition artworks, books, and objects, an accordion-fold photography and poetry book, posters by Algiers-based illustrator Lisyersam, and a Mouima Matcha pop-up serving drinks curated by Si Merabet himself.

Jidar, founded by Fouad Boujedra and Mina Habchi as a space for exhibition, research and experimentation, becomes somewhere visitors can linger, talk, read, and drink alongside the work.

10am–6pm daily from Aug. 7-11, Jidar Gallery, 82 Rue Didouche Mourad, 2nd Floor, Right Door, Algiers

The Confused Arab Comes Home With ‘Alger Capitale’

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The Confused Arab Comes Home With ‘Alger Capitale’

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