Héla Ammar is a photographer born in 1969 in Tunis, currently living and working in La Marsa, Tunisia. Her work consistently explores and questions the concepts of memory, identity, and time, in correlation with Tunisia’s historical and political narratives.

The granddaughter and great-granddaughter of political figures involved in the struggle for independence, Héla Ammar has since explored two parallel paths: On the one hand, a photographic work on the margins of and on the discrimination at work in Tunisian society today (homophobia, racism, sexism, censorship), where the portrait dominates: prison population, women, queer people, black people, journalists and free speech activists, etc. On the other hand, a visual work based on personal and historical archives  intended to question the mechanisms of collective memory and the way in which past events are perceived and transmitted.  

For Héla, working with archives makes it possible to reconnect the present to the past, to question established historical narratives, and to give voice to invisible or forgotten perspectives. By weaving links between personal and official archives with a common thread, she addresses issues related to identity, memory and the impact of historical events on individuals and societies. “The Tunisian revolution freed the image from the propaganda function to which the dictatorship had limited it. It was this brand-new thirst for images of the present moment that provoked in me a hunger for images of the past. To paraphrase Derrida, I would say that I was suffering ‘an archive fever. As if this sudden presence of a Tunisia in full swing revealed the absence of all the aspects of a Tunisia that had been hidden or denied. This made me want to retrace the steps of the past and connect them to the present.”

In Love Letters (2018-2022), Héla Ammar extends the aesthetic research begun with Tarz, and takes a step further by combining her family archives with historical archives, her individual biography with the collective destiny of her country. Borrowing from the codes of love correspondence, she reveals the improbable romance between her grandfather, son of Hassouna Ayachi, one of the founders of the Destour (the first Tunisian republican party, founded in 1920 to liberate Tunisia from colonial rule), and himself a fighter for independence, and a young Corsican woman born in a Tunisia under French protectorate. With the consent of his Tunisian fiancée, Héla Ammar’s grandfather finally married the two women in 1945 under the regime of polygamy. The family thrived in Sousse during a pivotal period in the history of Tunisia, during which the artist’s grandfather played a political role: the end of the French protectorate and the birth of the Republic proclaimed on March 20, 1956. One of the first reforms carried out after independence, under the impetus of Habib Bourguiba, was the Personal Status Code (or CSP). This set of laws profoundly changed family law and marked a major advance for women’s rights in Tunisia, in particular by imposing marriage by mutual consent, prohibiting polygamy, setting a legal age for marriage and facilitating divorce. Committed to the feminist struggle, Héla Ammar nevertheless has fond memories of a happy childhood spent with her mother and two grandmothers in the family home in Sousse, being nurtured by two cultures and proud to belong to a revolutionary lineage. 

Discover Héla Ammar’s work on her website or her Instagram.

Meriem Bouderbala is a Franco-Tunisian visual artist, living and working in Tunis. She works with photography, painting, and scenography, blending vernacular materials with references to popular traditions. She explores identity and the female body through fragmented self-portraits inspired by Orientalism and Islamic geometric patterns. Her creations, which combine visual kaleidoscopes and social critique, express an identity dualism and a search for freedom in a changing world. 

“Their images, exemplary of a form of Orientalism, were intended to please the colonist. Women and adolescents of both sexes, often partially or totally naked, responded to a dual form of assignment: that of being reduced to ‘natives’ as well as objects of erotic provocation. It is another form of distance, or of confusion, that is established here. The sexual body is not concealed but assimilated to the animality to which the “savage” is supposedly closer.” Based on the photographs of Lehnert & Landrock, Meriem Bouderbala in turn photographs herself in carefully composed scenes. Made up, adorned and dressed in traditional costumes and jewelry from different regions of Tunisia, revealing or suggesting the usual attributes of seduction (breasts, genitals, feet, legs, face), she re-enacts the folkloric and erotic imagination disseminated by orientalist photographers. At the time, the models who agreed to pose were prostitutes, slaves or women from minority groups, completely subject to the colonial male gaze (or, for the few Western models, slipping into the role of the odalisque probably as a sexual game).

But now the artist is alone in front of the camera, which she operates using a self-timer, “both eye and subject”, avoiding the voyeuristic gaze and controlling what she wants to show and hide. 

In Islamic thought, God is infinite and immaterial, and therefore not figuratively representable. Geometric patterns express this transcendence through an interplay of infinite repetition, evoking divine order and cosmic perfection, and inviting meditation and contemplation. Here, the body fades behind the mathematical order of the world, but the pattern sometimes takes the form of a breast, allows a glimpse of bare feet or a gaze emphasized with kohl, and breaks the harmony of the rhythm in a transgressive gesture. The recurrence of the motifs also makes sense in relation to the work of the craftswomen enclosed in the fabrics – “the age-old, repetitive gesture, the recurring signs that end up forging an imagination that runs through us” – in a play of correspondences between the codified gesture of the hand and the resources of contemporary technology. 

Alongside Psykedelik, Hypnos / Shroud (2012) extend this reflection on the body as a trace of presence and echo the history of Jumièges Abbey and the legend of the Unnerved of Jumièges, whose recumbent statues occupy the central space.

Meriem Bouderbala’s work on iconography is here combined with work on the material. Photography? Sculpture? Installation? On a chair, Hypnos / Shroud creates confusion, even fear: a blanket rolled up and printed with a photograph from the series inspired by Lehnert & Landrock, it is not immediately clear whether it is a work of art or a real female body wrapped in fabric, whether she is asleep or dead (the image of the woman rolled up in a carpet may recall several historical accounts and artistic representations linked to the “Orient”, notably Cleopatra’s stratagem to meet Julius Caesar).

Discover Meriem Bouderbala’s work on her Instagram.

Asma Ben Aïssa is a Tunisian visual artist born in Bizerte in 1992. She lives and works in Tunis. Her work explores themes of landscape, architecture, social transformation and transmission, whether in textiles, sculptures, installations or experiments, using craft techniques that she handles experimentally.  

With Woven Window | نافذة من نسيج, a project that began in 2022, the artist Asma Ben Aïssa integrates photography for the first time into a textile practice that has constantly questioned the notions of space, architecture and landscape since its beginnings. Embroidered photographs, sound editing and textile works are combined in an installation based on the theme of an intangible heritage typical of northern Tunisia: the “barmakli” (برمقلي) embroidery stitch, particularly used to adorn bridal veils, traditional dresses and household linen with geometric, floral or arabesque patterns. Performed with a thick thread on a fine fabric (often linen or cotton), this technique requires exceptional skill, passed down orally and by gesture, from mother to daughter, by expert embroiderers, within the domestic space (patio). Eager to learn and document this skill, Asma is also attentive to the spatial characteristics of the “barmakli” , which, with its repetitive openwork patterns, resembles the “mashrabiya”.

“We had no leisure, except to meet in the patios from morning to night to learn embroidery… It was in the 70s. I watched my sister embroider her wedding dress and, stitch by stitch, I learned. At weddings, when I was still a child, I would sit alongside the women to scrutinize their movements, memorizing every knot and every pattern. So, little by little, I became maalmat, master embroiderer.” 

Testimonies of maalmat (soundtrack extract from the Woven Window project)

With the installation Woven Window, Asma has created a living, collective and hybrid archive in which the fragility of a skill and the lives of women hidden from the outside gaze, who have passed it on from generation to generation, are restored in a form in which sound recordings, photographs and embroidery composed by the several hands of the artist and the maalmat to whom she pays tribute. Through a work that takes the path of experimentation, the artist does not merely create for herself: she reinscribes in the collective memory the erased voices of these women and transcends the boundaries between interior and exterior, vernacular know-how and historical heritage, the feminine and masculine worlds. It invites us to rediscover the subversive force of a simple thread guided by women’s hands, when each stitch becomes a gesture of intimate revolt or an act of remembrance. 

Discover Asma Ben Aïssa’s work on her website or her Instagram.

Amira Lamti is a Tunisian visual artist born in 1996 in Sousse, where she lives and works. From the very beginning, she uses photography and videography as tools to fragment her daily life, capturing moments, gestures, and rituals. Her work questions notions such as heritage and transmission.

As the title of her project, completed in 2024, indicates, Amira Lamti is “Bent el Machta”, daughter and granddaughter of a “machta”. The “machta” is a traditional figure in the wedding rituals of the Tunisian Sahel region, where the artist, born in Sousse, comes from. She prepares and accompanies the young bride for the “jelwa”, a pre-wedding ceremony in which the woman is the center, marking her transition from maiden to wife, from the family home to that of her husband.

In Bent el Machta, Amira Lamti makes a number of changes and deviations from the traditional ritual. Drawing on family resources, she creates a series of self-portraits in which she appears not as a machta but as a bride – wearing the traditional costume, her hands colored with henna and her face made up with distinctive patterns. Playing at machta herself, behind the camera, she places the kufiya (an ornate veil that covers the bride’s head and face before her unveiling) on her family members of the same generation: a cousin who has already been married for ten years, another who was born in Denmark, and her brother – why not, after all, take advantage of this veil to casually subvert the ritual? She takes her “brides” out of the domestic space to have them pose outside, in sumptuous natural settings such as the beach or the salt marshes of Sousse. 

For Amira Lamti, having a man pose allows her to question the representations and the role traditionally assigned to women in the patriarchal institution of marriage. Her brother thus testifies to his experience as a model: “I found it a little strange that my sister Amira asked me to pose in this traditional female garment, especially in public, on the beach in summer in Sousse where everyone knows the function of this garment.