Samia Henni Exhibition Talk

Samia Henni: Exhibition Talk: Colonial Toxicity

In this talk, historian and curator Samia Henni will discuss her exhibition Colonial Toxicity: French Radioactive Architecture and Landscape in the Sahara, which documents the little-known history of French nuclear colonialism in the Algerian Sahara. 

Between 1960 and 1966, the French colonial regime detonated four atmospheric atomic bombs and thirteen underground nuclear bombs in the Sahara Desert in Algeria, causing radioactive fallout that affected Algeria, Africa, and the Mediterranean, as well as irreversible damage to living beings, the natural environment, and buildings. More than 60 years after the first bomb was detonated, access to the archives of the French nuclear program remains very limited, and the consequences of these detonations remain largely unknown.

This talk is presented at the UQAM Design Centre.

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Samia Henni is a historian of built, destroyed, and imagined environments. She received her doctorate in architectural history and theory from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich) and currently teaches at the Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture at McGill University in Montreal. Her work addresses issues of colonization, war, resource extraction, deserts, forced displacement, and gender dynamics.

She published Architecture of the Counterrevolution: The French Army in Northern Algeria with gta Verlag (EN) in 2017 and Éditions B42 (FR) in 2019, Colonial Toxicity: Rehearsing French Radioactive Architecture and Landscape in the Sahara with If I Can’t Dance, Framer Framed edition fink (EN) in 2024 and Colonial Toxicity: Documenting the Radioactive Landscape in the Sahara with Éditions B42 (FR) in 2026. She edited the collective works War Zones (2018) and Deserts Are Not Empty (2022, 2024) and several exhibitions, including Psychocolonial Spaces (2025–), Performing Colonial Toxicity (2023–), and Discreet Violence (2017–).

Conversations in Contemporary Art is a free event series sponsored by Concordia University's Studio Arts MFA Program. The series provides a unique opportunity to hear artists, designers, critics, writers, educators, and curators share their practice(s) and perspectives. 

This series is made possible through the generous support of Lillian and Billy Mauer.