2009
Photographic diptych,
digital printing on brushed dibond,
120 × 70 cm (each one)
Inv. 2010.1197 (1-2)
Notice
Halida Boughriet is a young French artist
who has already found her way, rooting her
work in the state of the world, the
authoritarian moments we call wars,
politics and religion, and the imprint they
leave on people. Thanks to her Algerian
origins, her development has been influenced
by several rich cultures. As sources of
observation and questioning, they also
prompt her to relativise their data,
through poetic gestures about the nature of
what lies at the basis of human relations.
As soon as she graduated from the ENSBA
(Advanced School of Fine Arts) in Paris,
then in New York, where she studied at the
School of Visual Art until 2005, her eye
was already that of a photographer and
video-maker. She captures people in their
environment, frequently an urban one,
revealing their fragilities and their
doubts. Her video Action (2003), which the
Centre Pompidou has just acquired, explores
the ambivalent, not to say impossible,
relations between the cultures of the West
and the Third World, conveying the
differences through the varying reactions
to her gesture of reaching out to touch –
a hand barely brushed against – from the
most violent to the most restrained, by way
of a whole lot of indifference.)
In her residencies (in Bosnia, Africa and,
most recently, Algeria), Halida Boughriet
revealed in a more or less head-on way
conflicts and their scars, recording life
that resists, as in Dream City (2008),
where children’s games ‘re-grow’ on
scorched earth, and La Boîte à musique
[The Music Box] (2009), where the testimony
of children and war victims is linked
with ‘one’ image of childhood.)
In questioning the notion of ‘sin’ in
various cultures, she commissioned writings
from several writers and slam poets, texts
that are often dazzlingly beautiful and
oscillate between this Judeo-Christian
notion and the concept of guilt. During her
residency at Jijel in Algeria, she produced
Maux de mots (literally: ‘word troubles’ or
‘aches’), inscribing these recollections on
the backs of a man and a woman, in red ink.
Like history, ink is indelible and
gradually fades in the ebb and flow of the
sea, where the bodies lie prone.)
Halida Boughriet lends the images of this
diptych the oriental splendour of icons and
a sacred character through the text that
runs and vanishes, like memory failing and
inevitably fizzling. This work in the making
sparkles with a thousand promises, thanks
both to the profoundly humane way that
Halida Boughriet looks at things, and to
the freedom of her viewpoints and stances,
invariably empathising with those whom the
world marks with a brand.
A.F.