Youssef Taki (b. 1995, Oujda, Morocco) is an artist, educator, and researcher. His work operates at the intersection of artistic practice and academic research, combining methodologies from colonial studies and decolonial theory with his lived experience as a migrant in the European context. Through image-making, archival research, vernacular records, and counter-hegemonic storytelling, he examines how colonial and postcolonial structures continue to shape visual narratives, influencing the construction of identities, memories, and bodies marked by the experience of borders.
His practice engages with questions of self-representation, interculturality, territoriality, and the politics of visuality, using artistic practice as a space for resistance and critical re-reading of hegemonic discourses. Taki has participated in national and international exhibitions and events, including the Dakar Biennale, Larnaca Biennale, TEA Contemporary Biennial, and the Tenerife International Photography Biennial. His work has been presented at institutions such as the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Centre d’Arts Santa Mònica, Disseny Hub Barcelona, Museo del Prado, Instituto Cervantes, Goethe-Institut, Ateneo de Madrid, Fundación Antonio Pérez, and the Colegio de España at the Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris.
He has also exhibited in international galleries such as Berry Campbell (New York) and MENA Art Gallery (Berlin), as well as in significant spaces within the Spanish art context, including Galería Freijó, in dialogue with Joan Fontcuberta. Taki is a member of the collective Al’ Akhawat, with whom he develops socially engaged, community-based, and cultural mediation projects. He is the author of Out of Place (2022) and has developed numerous research and creation projects that explore memory, imaginaries, and visual narratives, challenging hegemonic discourses and proposing new forms of representation grounded in poetics and cultural resistance.