At the heart of Camille Soualem’s practice lies the human body—as image, as thought, and as a site of resistance. Her figures are both fragile and powerful, caught between tenderness and defiance. For Soualem, the body is never passive: it remembers, it absorbs violence, and it insists on presence. “Bodies think, and thoughts themselves are bodies,” she says.

Her paintings often show reclining or crouching figures compressed within intimate interiors - bedrooms, balconies, closets - spaces that protect and restrain at once. These gendered bodies appear fragmented, wrapped in painted skins marked by folds, scars, and tension. The soft stillness of the odalisque is undone; unease enters the frame.

Soualem’s work carries collective trauma within it. After the killing of Nahel Merzouk in 2023, anger became a driving force in her painting - mingling with inherited histories of racialised violence and quiet erasure. Her canvases hold what refuses to disappear.

In recent work, the bedroom emerges as refuge and resistance. Books take the place of bodies, forming a landscape of interior life and quiet solidarity. In Expanded Bodies, Soualem invites us into a world where identity is not fixed but fiercely lived—where the body becomes an emotional archive and a political witness.