Biography
Myriam Cohenca (b. 1992) is an Arab Jewish visual artist, photographer, and writer with roots in the Levant currently in residency at Fraise, in Montpellier (France). Working across photography, video, text, installation, and mixed media, her practice navigates the space between political urgency and poetic ritual.
Rooted in fieldwork, site-specific encounters, and long-term research, her work reflects on exile, identity, inheritance, human rights, and radical love, particularly within the context of Palestine-Israel. She has exhibited in Palestine, Spain, Italy, France, Austria and Morocco, and her work has been featured in independent publications such as The Markaz Review and Suboart. Alongside her artistic practice, she is actively involved in mutual aid initiatives supporting artists from the Land. She recently completed a long-term body of work titled How to Lose the War, which blends photography, video, text, and installation to explore systemic violence and the possibilities of resistance through poetic expression. She is currently developing Missing Data, a long-term research-creation project that reconstructs erased Arab Jewish memory through embodied rituals, intimate gestures, and imagined geographies across the Mediterranean.
Artist statement
Myriam Cohenca is an Arab Jewish artist and peace activist whose work confronts political violence, memory, and erasure through poetic imagery, ritual, and layered sensory experiences. Her practice moves through grief, exile, resistance, and radical care, rooted in her Mizrahi heritage and the landscapes of the Holy Land.
Originally trained in photography, she now works across video, sound, installation, performance, and writing. Her recent works, Kaddish, Acts of Resistance, Letter to a Dead Soldier, Shetah Esh, and One Drop + One Drop, form a constellation of intimate rituals and visual testimonies that refuse binary narratives. Whether whispering apologies while smashing pomegranates or carrying soil across borders, she creates spaces where tenderness becomes a form of resistance.
Cohenca’s visual language blends poetic abstraction with documentary remnants. Recurring materials, ash, oil, sand, become both symbol and evidence, grounding her exploration of political rupture and embodied mourning.
Influenced by Ana Mendieta, Andrei Tarkovsky, Mahmoud Darwish, Etel Adnan, and Sergei Parajanov, her work exists between invocation and image. Her videos and installations function as living archives, fragile, fractured, and urgently present.
Through her ongoing engagement with her Arab Jewish lineage, Cohenca is currently exploring the cultural and political traces of the Ottoman Empire and Al-Andalus, and how they shaped the Holy Land. Her work does not offer answers,it offers presence.
A space to remember, to grieve, and to imagine radically different futures.