Galerie Claude Lemand

Photographs by Halida BOUGHRIET.

Memories in Oblivion, 2010-2011.

Serie of 6 orig­inal pho­tographs. Lambda print mounted on Dibond, 120 x 180 cm.
Signed and num­bered by the artist.
Donation Claude & France Lemand 2020.
© Artist. Museum, Institut du monde arabe, Paris.

« 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. »