Samia Henni is a historian and an exhibition maker of the built, destroyed and imagined environments.
She is the author of Architecture of Counterrevolution: The French Army in Northern Algeria (2017, 2022, EN; 2019, FR) and Colonial Toxicity: Rehearsing French Radioactive Architecture and Landscape in the Sahara (2024). She is the editor of Deserts Are Not Empty (2022) and War Zones (2018). She is also the maker of exhibitions, such as Performing Colonial Toxicity (Framer Framed, If I Can’t Dance, Amsterdam; gta Exhibitions, Zurich; The Mosaic Rooms, London; Brown University, Providence; 2023–25), Discreet Violence: Architecture and the French War in Algeria (Zurich, Rotterdam, Berlin, Johannesburg, Paris, Prague, Ithaca, Philadelphia, Charlottesville, 2017–22), Archives: Secret-Défense? (ifa Gallery, SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin, 2021), and Housing Pharmacology (Manifesta 13, Marseille, 2020).
Currently, she teaches at McGill University’s Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture in Montreal and co-chairs Columbia University Seminar’s Beyond France.
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