"Le Voyage" by Djamal Benmokhtar.

As part of its cultural and academic initiatives, the International University of Sarajevo (IUS) hosted an Artist Talks session with photographer Djamal Benmokhtar, whose work explores identity, displacement, memory, and belonging through intimate visual storytelling. Born in Algeria and forced to leave the country with his family in 1973, Benmokhtar grew up between France and Algeria, developing a lasting awareness of displacement and the complexity of belonging. These experiences continue to shape his practice, which focuses on migration, rupture, and the lives that unfold between cultures and borders. Since 2021, he has documented the lives of African migrants arriving in the Canary Islands, creating long-term visual narratives grounded in time, trust, and human connection. As he reflects, photography is less about explaining and more about sharing experience and making visible lives that exist between worlds.