I MIEI SOGNI D'ANARCHIA - Calabria Anarchica: Hela Ammar Born in Tunis in 1969 Tunisian Artist

sabato 2 dicembre 2017

Hela Ammar Born in Tunis in 1969 Tunisian Artist - The Feminine Identities

Hela Ammar

Born in Tunis in 1969, Hela Ammar is now one of Tunisia’s leading intellectuals, as well as being an artist. She lives in Sidi Bou Said, where the gallery Le Violon Bleu is an important platform for her artworks. Ammar works with photography, sound installations, and recently with embroideries in her 2014 work, ‘Tarz.’ Her work is highly engaged with public issues — Ammar is a strong feminist and advocate for women and looks in her art to explore the female identity among the moral and religious conventions of Tunisia today and in the past. As a scholar and writer, she has documented the use of the death penalty in modern Tunisia.

Purification | 2009

In this series Héla revisit the ritual of expiation through a double symbolic : that of the body (immaculate or impure) and of the blood (in its most paradoxical acceptances (life / honor / dirt). Doing so, she questions our traditions and beliefs which sometimes relegate the body to an impurity, a taboo or a sin which must be washed and sometimes raise it to an object of sacrifice.

Counfa (convoi) | 2011

The events that shook Tunisia during the revolution have not spared Tunisian prisons. They were the sad theater of mutinies, fires, escapes and abuses of all kinds. It was after these events that I was allowed to visit and get in touch with prisoners. That was the first time that such authorization was given, so far prisons were a highly secret closed world, one of the pieces of the dictatorial machine. What I saw and heard in the twelve prisons I have visited exceeded all what I could have imagined. I lived there an intense experience where there was no more outside or inside, nor good or bad, nor time or space but only men and women who have lost more than their freedom. Encaged like animals in dirty damp and cold cells, those men and women were also stripped of their dignity.

“Counfa” is a distortion of the term convoy. Prisoners use this word to refer to their transfer from one prison to another. As them, I moved from one prison to another. And I felt my foray into prison as a convoy through time and space, where the agreed benchmarks are lost to make way for the greatest paradoxes. To testify this trip, I chose to deliver in bulk images and sounds that overlap. The sad song evoking exile echoes the prisoner’s testimonies and the images stolen through the thick prison’s walls form as many colliding memories that question human being and men’s justice.

text by Hela Ammar

Born in 1969, Tunis, Tunisia.
Lives and works in Sidi Bou Saïd, Tunisia.

Héla Ammar joins in the lineage of this artists' new generation arab women whose approach often expresses an internal, social and cultural duality in their quest of identity. Born in june 1969, she lives and works in Sidi Bou Said (Tunisia). She is directly inspired of her daily experiences, her life, of the way she communicates to bring her vision on identity, social and political issues. Taking advantage of her meetings, she continues to intersect the individual to society and to confront their legitimate aspirations with their reality at once cultural political or social. Since 2003, her work has been regularly showcased in Tunisia and abroad. She took part in numerous solo and group shows in Tunisia and abroad (Egypt, Germany, France, Belgium, Swizerland,Spain…). Her work has been shown in various international art fairs including Printemps des art Fair Tunis 2012, Rencontres photographiques de Bamako 2011, Marrakech Art Fair 2010, Dream City Tunisia 2010 and 2012, ArtDubai 2008, Barcelona Biennial 2007, ArtParis-AbuDhabi 2007…So far, her work has been the subject to many articles and comments in Tunisian and foreign publications.