Installation view, ‘Transit’, 2011, HD video duration 07:50, in ‘My Sister Who Travels’ at Mosaic Rooms, London.
Image courtesy the artist.
The picturesque evaporates, as questions of economic and political migration surface through human narratives of movement. These ‘moving photographs’, like their still counterparts, explore political inequalities between the Global North and the Global South.
Tirage Lambda contrecollé sur dibond.
120×180 cm -Edition de 5 + 2 EA
Musée MAMA , Alger. Le Retour ( 2011)
Institut des cultures de l’islam, Paris. 50 ans de Réflexion ( 2012)
Institut du monde arabe (IMA), Paris . » Corps découvert » . ( 2012)
Musée, Institut du monde arabe, Paris – Donation Claude & France Lemand 2020. © Halida Boughriet
La scène s’ouvre ainsi : allongées sur une banquette, des femmes que la pesanteur de l’âge a doucement assoupi s’offrent à notre regard. Le corps féminin, cet objet de délit, de pudeur ou de fantasmes. Mais surtout, le corps de l’ailleurs, de cet « Orient » lointain qu’une lumière dense nécessairement domestiquée vient baigner. Dans la série Une Mémoire dans l’oubli, Halida Boughriet réintroduit certaines des typologies diffusées par la peinture orientaliste pour mieux en déconstruire la mythologie. L’imagerie figée et idéalisée du quotidien cède à la banalité d’un intérieur que la présence vient à peine troubler, comme un écho à la mémoire de ces veuves algériennes,témoins anonymes de la guerre d’indépendance.C’est en posant un regard empli de sensibilité que. Halida Boughriet parvient à restituer lacondition humaine de ces corps politiques.
Fanny Gillet
Mémoires dans l’Oublie (Memories in Oblivion) , 2011
C-Print, 120 x 180 cm. (47,2 x 70,8 inches)
Photography often borrows its topics from painting, a tradition inherited from Gustave Courbet. The photo series ‘Memories in Oblivion’ are images of great historical figures seen through a reversed lens –one that takes ownership of the stigma attached to each of them. This aesthetic approach becomes a ritual and an act of portrayal. It is an approach that is critical of Orientalism, and inseparable from reality and its humanism — contrary to the Orientalist representations that didn’t see the human, and were mostly concerned with their own projections and lust.
‘Memories in Oblivion’. It is part of a series of portraits of widows who have suffered the violence of the war in Algeria. His period is an intrinsic part of my family’s history. These women in the portraits represent a collective memory: they are the last witnesses. However, when one evokes the war in Algeria, one never thinks about them, mainly because official history, nor popular imagination of the war includes them. However, these widows were very much part of that history, and that war: they have suffered, resisted, lost
their husbands.
