About
Sfiya is a visual artist based in Montreal and holds a master’s degree in architecture from the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture et de Paysage de Bordeaux (France). Her work has been presented at several major art events, including Drawing Now Paris (2026), Plural in Montreal (2026), the Foire en art actuel de Québec (2025), Art Toronto (2025), artch (2024), Mtl en Arts (2024), Pictura (2023) and Art Souterrain (2022). She has also collaborated with the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts on the Landline project (2023).
She has taken part in various exhibitions in New York, Montreal and Quebec City, notably at the galleries Aicon Art (2026) and Chiguer Art Contemporain (2025). In 2021, she presented her first solo exhibition, H’rira, at the Centre culturel marocain de Montréal.
A recipient of a grant from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, she created the project Œil pour Œil, presented in Montreal at Fais-moi l’art (2024), then at the Centre culturel Georges-Vanier (2025) and in Shawinigan at the Centre d’exposition Léo-Ayotte (2026).
In autumn 2026, Sfiya will present her third solo exhibition, Le Théâtre imaginaire de Ouled Saïd, a project supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, which will be shown at the Maison de la culture Notre-Dame-de-Grâce – Monkland in Montreal.
Her deeply narrative work draws on stories passed down orally by her family and community. Through storytelling, drawing and painting, she explores how the experience of migration leads one to appropriate a vicarious memory, inherited and inhabited from a distance by descendants who seek to understand and connect with an identity past they have not directly lived.
Her recent project Le Théâtre imaginaire de Ouled Saïd is the culmination of this long-standing research. Financially supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, it stages an imagined nostalgia for the Ouled Saïd tribe in Morocco, her grandfather’s land of origin. Drawing on family stories, Sfiya gradually recreated Ouled Saïd in her imagination, until shaping the nostalgia of a place she has never set foot in — and which may never have existed.
In sets she builds herself, the artist stages her fictional reunions with imagined inhabitants. Conceiving Ouled Saïd as a theatre allows her to acknowledge the subjectivity inherent in her gaze. She fully embraces this stance in order to move into a space of free creation, able to fill, or not, the absence of a real experience of the place. This exploration raises a central question: does the diaspora fabricate “mental sets” to connect with origins that are hard to reach?
Memory as a space of fiction
Sfiya approaches diasporic memory as a space of fiction. Through narrative, drawing and painting, she builds a place where different eras, spaces and reminiscences overlap, investing territories that tell themselves without always being transcribed.
Memory frees itself from the obligation of accuracy to become a visual metaphor for plural experiences, generating a sense of shared belonging and partly repairing the losses linked to migration. Sfiya deploys a visual vocabulary steeped in Moroccan agricultural scenes, rural animals and the equestrian ornaments of the tbourida.
Treated with a deliberately restricted palette, this iconography blends the characters with the landscapes they are trying to find again. Often placed at the centre of the composition, the figure asserts the scenic nature of the work and recalls the frontality of family photographs, suspending time to give body to this invented memory.