Bahia Ourahou

Born in 1999 in Rabat, Bahia Ourahou grew up in the Moroccan capital before crossing the Mediterranean to pursue her art education in France. She received her National Diploma in Art from the École nationale supérieure d’art de Paris-Cergy (ENSAPC) in 2021, and later completed her Master’s degree in photography at the École nationale supérieure de la photographie in Arles (ENSP) in 2024.

Her artistic journey began with drawing and painting in early childhood—a quiet, intuitive connection to the visual that later expanded into photography and video during her teenage years. Self-taught in these mediums, she cultivated an evolving language of image-making rooted in sensitivity and observation. Her years in art school further deepened this relationship with the photographic image, shaping both her technique and conceptual framework, and affirming her choice to dedicate herself fully to the lens-based arts.

Bahia’s practice is anchored in movement—between cities, languages, and emotional landscapes. Living and working between Paris, Arles, and Rabat, with a formative exchange in Valencia, her trajectory traces a personal and symbolic geography around the Mediterranean basin. This sea, with its porous borders and layered histories, recurs as both subject and metaphor in her work.

Her photographs explore the physical and intimate territories she inhabits—spaces where memory, migration, and belonging quietly unfold. She returns often to themes of youth, familial bonds, and mourning, attentive to how these experiences take shape in the bodies, gestures, and landscapes she documents. With a poetic and quietly political gaze, her work attends to what is tender, fleeting, and unspoken.