Amina Kadous
Kadous views photography as an object of memory and vessels of history. Drawing from her personal stories, archival traces, and landscapes that carry the weight of her history.Through her practice, she aims to create a living archive—one that resists forgetting, evolves over time, and engages with the present.Her work seeks to preserve collective memory, history, and cultural heritage, reclaiming public spaces and memories to counter erasure and loss.By deconstructing and recontextualizing these materials, Kadous examines how we remember, what we forget, and how the act of remembering itself evolves.
With an autobiographical and intimate approach, kadous merges the rawness of personal narrative with documentary. Moving from the introspective lens to more universal topics. Her work often begins from an inward place, drawing on her personal experience, then extends outward to explore broader social and collective themes. She believes that individuals are reflections of the societies they inhabit, and this belief consistently shapes the stories she tells. Whether working with family photographs, oral histories, or contemporary landscapes, she uses the camera as a tool to preserve, reimagine, and resist erasure. kadous’s work is often complex and multilayered, shaped by the overarching theme of the architecture of memory. She explores how personal and collective memories are built, layered, and preserved — much like a city’s architecture.Through her projects she raises questions around what is being lost? who gets to decide what stays and what goes? Photography for her became not just an act of witnessing but also an act of intervention. Through her art, she seeks to preserve vanishing landscapes and endangered cultural heritage, challenge dominant narratives, and confront historical erasure. By documenting industrial spaces and intimate personal stories, she is shaping a living archive that bridges memory, identity, and history.
Amina Kadous’s work has been widely celebrated and exhibited internationally. In 2019, she was selected to exhibit at the Bamako Biennale of Photography (Mali), where she received the Centre Soleil d’Afrique Prize for her project A Crack in the Memory of My Memory. The award honors an outstanding African female artist whose work shows strong promise and artistic development.Her work has since been shown at prominent festivals and institutions, including the Lagos Photo Festival (Nigeria), Africa Foto Fair (Côte d’Ivoire), PhotoESPAÑA (Madrid), and the Tropenmuseum (Netherlands).Kadous is the recipient of several notable awards and grants. In 2022, she was awarded the 6th Madame Figaro Photography Prize at Rencontres d’Arles for her project White Gold—an intimate and universal exploration of the erosion of Egypt’s cotton heritage. That same year, she received the Contemporary African Photography Prize and was nominated for both the Prix Pictet and the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize.In 2023, she won first prize at the Kranj Photography Festival (Slovenia) under the theme “Human and Nature,”. She also received the Sheikh Saoud Al Thani Award. Most recently, she was shortlisted for the 2025 Foam Paul Huf Award and selected for the World Press Photo’s Joop Swart Masterclass.
Solo Exhibitions:
2023: White Gold , Kranj Foto Festival, Kranj, Slovenia
2023: White Gold, Thessaloniki PhotoBiennale, MOMus, Thessaloniki, Greece.
Selected Group Exhibitions:
2025: Enduring Horizons, Tasweer Photo Festival, Doha, Qatar
2025: Powers of The Unseen, Express Newark, Newark, New Jersey
2024: Unstable Points , 7th edition of Jaou Tunis contemporary Art Biennale, Tunis, Tunisia
2024: Encontros Da Imagem group exhibition, Soma Plataforma cultural, Braga, Portugal
2024: Through the Smog, Future Gallery, Tahrir Cultural Centre, Cairo, Egypt
2024: Hamburg Portfolio Review participants Exhibitions, FreeLens Gallery, Hamburg, Germany
2024: Elastic Vision Curated by Faridah Folawiyo, Efie Gallery, Dubai, UAE
2023: Africa Foto Fair, Second Edition, Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire
2023: Shifting Sands: Environmental issues in the Arab world, Casa Arabe, Cordoba, Spain
2023: CAP prize exhibition in Leipzig Photobook Festival, Grassi Museum, Leipzig, Germany
2022: If A tree falls in a forest Exhibition, Arles photography Festival, France.
2022: Past Forward – Time, Life and Longing, Cortona on the Move, Alula, Saudi Arabia.
2020: Vantage Point Sharjah 8 (VPS8), Al Hamriyah Studios, Al Sharjah
2020: 1-54 African contemporary Art Fair with The Photographic Collective, London, UK
2020: Through the Lens Of , Afrika Museum , Berg en Dal, The Netherlands
2019:12th Edition Les Encontres de Bamako, Biennale Africaine de La Photographie, Mali
Awards and Recognition:
2025: WorldPress Joop Swart Masterclass
2025: Shortlisted Foam Paul Huf Award, Amsterdam
2023: The grand prize of Kranj Foto Festival Winner, Kranj, Slovenia
2023: The Sheikh Saoud Al Thani award Tasweer grant Project Award Winner , Doha, Qatar
2023 : Shortlisted Grand Prix Images Vevey Project award, Switzerland
2023 : Nominated for Prix Pictet, Geneva, Switzerland
2023 :Nominated for Deutsche Börse Foundation Photography Prize
2022 :PRIX DE LA PHOTO MADAME FIGARO, RENCONTRES ARLES
2022 : Everyday Projects Grant, Finalist
2022 :Contemporary African Photography Prize
2020 : Arab Documentary Photography Program Grant Award, Beirut, Lebanon
