Région Sud Art Prize : Nina Boughanim
Nails pierce through partitions, roof tiles take on bodily forms, wooden structures rise up like the remnants of an interior. Nina Boughanim’s house isn’t so strange: it feels both familiar and unreal. We think we recognize the codes of a suburban world — a frame, a shelter, a flower, a window, everything seemingly in its place. And yet certain details deviate from this ideal image. The façade still stands, but it already shows its cracks in the walls and its danger in the corners.
The artificial turf covering the space extends this puzzle. Too green, too even, too clean, it evokes not so much grass as nature turned into staging — the kind found in model subdivisions, in flawless exteriors, in neighborhoods where nothing seems to age. Even living things remain suspended, but this stillness has nothing peaceful about it: the lawn no longer grows, the flowers turn to stone. It resembles less a garden than a display case, where perfection ends up looking suspect, bittersweet — like those seductive plants one discovers, too late, to be toxic.
Nourished by multiple female figures, but also by a whole popular imaginary — from Buffy to Desperate Housewives — Nina also questions contemporary representations of femininity. Here, fake nails become far more than an aesthetic or social marker: they speak of bodies that fashion, protect, and expose themselves, but also of identities to which a value or a judgment gets assigned. Linked to the figure of the cagole (the working-class Marseille girl, brash and flashy), they stand as thorny tools of resistance. They pierce through walls, perforate surfaces, and extend the human into architecture itself.
The artist’s Belles Plantes seduce at first with their delicacy — until one discovers they are made of steel. The artificial nails shine, but they sting. Nothing is entirely welcoming. Danger is never spectacular; it settles in quietly, sometimes above our heads or at eye level, as if daring us. In a point, an edge, a material that refuses to let us pass unscathed.
With À l’abri des cuisses (Sheltered by the Thighs), this logic becomes almost literal. Inspired by canal roof tiles, the sculpture revives an old fabrication gesture by molding clay against the artist’s own thighs, as an old craft legend would have it. This shift is decisive: the body no longer merely comes to inhabit the shelter — it becomes its origin, its measure, its mold. The home is born of a bodily imprint, and with it, an entire memory of manual labor, often feminine, often made invisible. This attentiveness to place recurs elsewhere in her practice. A shower basin behind a beaded curtain, or fragments of built structure, offer themselves up like the ruins of a deserted interior.
The house is still standing, but the clock has stopped. The flowers no longer wilt, the lawn stays eternally green, the imprints already seem fossilized. Nothing really ages, but nothing is truly alive either. The garden invades the living room, while the ground reminds us that this nature is nothing but a simulacrum. Behind the home’s flawless appearances, everyday life keeps on stinging.
Pierre-Antoine Lalande
Bio
Nina Boughanim was born in 1995 in Marseille, where she lives and works. A multidisciplinary artist, she develops a practice rooted in sculpture, drawing, and installation.
Holding a vocational arts certificate and a degree from the École des Beaux-Arts de Marseille, she also studied at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Berlin.
Her work has been presented in several group exhibitions, notably at 100% L’Expo in Paris, the festival la Relève, and the Arts Éphémères festival. For the project Décollage at the Polaris art centre in Istres, she received an award and has more recently exhibited with the Spiaggia Libera gallery in Paris, Marseille, and Sofia.
In 2024, she joined Artagon Marseille. The following year, she presented her first solo exhibition at the 3 bis f art centre in Aix-en-Provence, following a two-month creative residency.
Currently invited by Voyons Voir to the Atelier de la Boiserie, she collects architectural wooden elements and furniture, which she reassembles. Through gestures of construction and assembly, she explores how these forms can become vessels of memory.
https://www.instagram.com/nina.boughanim/
