Aesthetic Breach: Past and Present Struggles for Justice in North African Comics
This exhibition brings together comics and graphic narratives from Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco, introducing a broad range of contemporary artists while centering the works of Sadri Khiari, a major figure of the antiracist left in Tunisia and France, and Salim Zerrouki, an Algerian cartoonist whose drawings combine ferocious satire and nostalgia. Across different forms, styles, and perspectives, these works engage questions of justice, memory, colonial and postcolonial histories, gender, migration, language, political struggle, and everyday life.
The artwork selected for this exhibition depicts complex social realities and historical trajectories, while personalizing global issues such as racist violence or societal collapse. Zerrouki’s Rwama chronicles the collapse of Algeria’s post-independence social order through daily life in an Algiers apartment complex. Khiari’s Toussaint est mort dans sa tombe reaches beyond North Africa to trace what happened to the body of Haitian revolutionary leader Toussaint Louverture after his death in French captivity.
The exhibition also asks us to pay attention to comics as form—to how these stories are told and why that matters. Speech balloons and panels offer ways to narrate intimate experiences, everyday life, and social issues. Indeed, graphic novels can be an entry into grassroots perspectives and individual experiences of subjection and resistance. Bringing comics into the gallery also draws attention to their visual and material qualities—to drawing and text, panels and sequences, composition and rhythm.
The Eloise Pickard Smith Gallery is a teaching gallery at UC Santa Cruz. This exhibition was developed in collaboration with Thomas Serres and the Center for the Middle East and North Africa. Curated by Faculty Director Susana Ruiz, curatorial intern Annelise Schouten, and the gallery team, with Simona Gabrieli as guest co-curator. With support from The Humanities Institute, Employing Humanities, and Jim Gunderson.
Reception: Nov 6, 2026 — 3 to 5pm at the Eloise Pickard Smith Gallery at Cowell College.