Artlog

The city of Algiers, legendary for its white walls cascading to the azure sea below, reflects the turbulent history of colonial occupation. Walls of Algiers: Narratives of the Colonial City, an exhibition featuring this city’s urban fabric, is drawn from diverse 19th- and 20th-century visual sources collected over the last two decades by the Research Library at the Getty Research Institute. The exhibition will map, for example, an itinerary of the Casbah and the European quarters through vintage postcards, illustrate the discourse on the Algerian house with chromolithographic architectural renderings and early photographs, and juxtapose the long-tradition of staged Orientalist representations of “indigenous” people with photojournalist coverage from the Algerian War. More than a colonial capital, Algiers served as a testing ground for urban renewal with its walls extending metaphorically across the Mediterranean to take part in the search for modernity.