The exhibition Waiting for Omar Gatlato: Contemporary Art from Algeria and Its Diaspora, currently at Columbia University’s Wallach Art Gallery, offers profound insight into contemporary Algeria, specifically the country’s collective efforts to define a postcolonial identity and singular art aesthetic after years of French colonialism, the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, and civil war between the Islamists and the government.
The exhibition concisely articulates a nuanced and complex topic despite some of the technical and aesthetic shortcomings of the artworks. It also presents works by a wide range of artists, some who were witness to modern Algeria’s birth as a newly liberated state in the 1950s, and others born on the cusp of Algeria’s “black decade” in the 1990s.