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Since its birth at the end of the 18th century, photography has been conducive to women’s creativity. “It’s a middle-brow art,” said Bourdieu. Between shadow and light, women were allowed to slip through, and this also applied to Tunisia, where the 2000s saw the emergence of talents led by the “female gaze.” Through group exhibitions organized by the Institut français de Tunis, such as L’image révélée (2006), Femmes d’Images (2007), and La Part du Corps (2010), the Tunisian public discovered female photographers who explored all the possibilities this medium offers.
This generation of artists from the 2000s, marked by the stifling of free expression under the authoritarian regime of President Ben Ali (1987-2011), did not fail to question the injunctions faced by women living in a Muslim society. Photographs are a form of silence. They were allowed to pass.
Among these artists, two women stand out for their finesse, subtlety, and boldness in reinventing the representation of the female body: Meriem Bouderbala, born in 1960, and Hela Ammar, born in 1969. Their work, which sometimes goes beyond photography to touch on a mix of techniques, is based on a fundamental question: Since the representation of women has long been dominated by men, how can it be reshaped, if not through a creative approach freed from the taboos of a deeply patriarchal society and the cliches of an Orientalist imagination?
Meriem Bouderbala twists the facets of a fantasized woman
Meriem Bouderbala, a dual Franco-Tunisian, graduated from the École des Beaux-Arts d’Aix-en-Provence in 1985. She lives between Paris and Tunis. Her dual identity influences her work: in her photographic installations, she enjoys playing with her self-portraits in a style that is both Orientalist and contemporary. She also juggles cliches related to the colonial view of Arab women’s bodies. To this end, in L’image révélée, she does not hesitate to strip her body bare, multiplying, disrupting, altering, veiling, and revealing it at will. In La Part du Corps, she blurs the lines. She subverts fantasies that have their origins in the Arabian Nights.
“Orientalist images have always fascinated me with their tragic beauty. Photographer and subject never meet. They both remain in their essential solitude,” says Bouderbala.
Jewelry, belts, pearls, gestures—the artists reproduces all the artifacts of fantasized seduction in her photomontages, transforming her characters into irresistible sirens: goddesses in shimmering colors. A detached and ironic look at an Orientalist universe, with its ever-vivid reminiscences.
Since the representation of women has long been dominated by men, how can it be reshaped, if not through a creative approach freed from the taboos of a deeply patriarchal society and the cliches of an Orientalist imagination?
“My journey is an attempt to escape from an alternative that I reject. I want to find that point where the human figure is both flesh and signs,” the artist writes in the exhibition catalog for La Part du Corps.
Exhibition curator and visual artist, Bouderbala works in multiple media—painting, video, installations, and photography—and uses diverse tools to explore a body in a state of eternal transformation. The artist has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Tunisia, Morocco, the Netherlands, the United States, and France. In 2012, as co-curator of the Printemps des Arts de la Marsa, she received death threats from Tunisian Salafists.
Meriem Bouderbala’s artistic portfolio:
Hela Ammar: Skin-deep portraits of LGBTQ+ activists
Hela Ammar often shared the exhibition space with Meriem Bouderbala, until she went her own way and presented her photos solo, especially from 2011 onwards. Hidden Portraits, Transes, Odalisques, and Purification are all series that deal with feminine identity. The most daring is probably Body Talks/A Fleur de peau, which was exhibited in 2018 at the Ghaya Gallery in Sidi Bou Said, in the northern suburbs of Tunis. A lawyer by training and profession and a self-taught artist by perseverance and passion, Ammar draws the strength of the images in A Fleur de peau from the richness of the marginalized territories of a post-2011 Revolution Tunisia. A Fleur de peau combines Ammar’s concerns as a politically engaged artist for freedom, equality, and dignity with former studio work on the codes of Orientalist imagery.
Her series portrays a generation of activists for individual freedoms—more specifically for LGBTQ+ rights. They are unusual portraits: the artist chose to hide the faces of well-known figures from the glare of local and international television. Covering the heads of her seven models—bloggers, journalists, and artists—with garishly colored floral hindiya scarves, the artist defies gender categories, conventional identities, and prevailing taboos surrounding the body. “Here, I asked them to renounce the notoriety their faces and identities convey and let their bodies tell their story. Together, they provide a glimpse into what’s at stake in a society like ours. Together, they form a vibrant portrait of a sensitive generation whose language defies the prejudices of time and space,” Ammar explains.
With elegance and skill, her photographs capture blatantly sensual, sometimes disturbing bodies crisscrossed with glaring tattoos. Their anonymity accentuates the fragility of these birds of prey, exposed in public spaces to all forms of violence: homophobia, racism, and sexism. Confident thanks to a long exchange with the artist, they offer themselves to view in a daylight that brings them closer to images of Renaissance pictorialism.
Hela Ammar’s work has been featured in various international exhibitions, including the Biennale des Photographes Contemporains du Monde Arabe (Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris, 2017), Dak’art Biennal 2016, and MuCem (Marseille, 2015). A selection of her photographic series is part of the permanent collection of the British Museum (London) and the Institut du Monde Arabe.
