Sofiane Benyahia

Sofiane Benyahia (born in 1985, France) is a visual artist who practices freediving. His work explores the depths of human consciousness through the lens of the marine world. A former submariner in the French Navy, he traded the steel hull for bare skin: from a closed world to one of suspended breath.

His unique practice unites painting, dance, and underwater photography, all created while freediving. Each gesture is limited by the duration of a breath: a vital constraint that becomes a space for creation. Underwater, matter escapes all control: the paint dilutes, the light diffracts, the body becomes a trace. The artist no longer dominates—he breathes with the world.

Influenced by Carl Jung, Wassily Kandinsky, and contemporary ecological thought, his work explores the link between humans and living things, between the visible and the invisible. Water becomes a symbol of the collective unconscious and a place of transmutation: a space where the boundaries of the self dissolve to allow an expanded awareness of life to emerge.

“Creating underwater is about experiencing the permeability between inside and outside. It's about recognizing that life is movement, and that breath is its universal language." – Sofiane Benyahia

Through his performances and exhibitions, Sofiane Benyahia develops an aesthetic of breath, where vulnerability becomes the beating heart of beauty. His work invites us to transform our perspective: to see the marine world not as a backdrop, but as a living, sensitive, and sacred subject.