The image opposite is taken from a poster published by the French Army's 5th Psychological Action Bureau. Created during the Algerian war, these offices were set up in July 1957 and disbanded in February 1960. They were responsible, within the headquarters, for a wide range of tasks grouped under the heading of "psychological action". This led them to devise a political programme advocating radical reform of colonial society and integration, and thus to adopt a stance that broke with the principle of the military's submission to politics. Underneath its apparently naïve and benevolent appearance, this poster barely conceals a paternalistic intention tinged with misogyny, reducing the veil to a cover-up and women to decorative objects, made to ‘"ook pretty". From this perspective, it is emblematic of the complex history of France's relationship with Algeria as seen through popular imagery. It also follows in the footsteps of colonial photography (it should be remembered that photography was invented at the same time as the conquest of Algiers), for which the unveiling of women was a constant preoccupation, as if the veil represented the symbol of an ultimate act of insubordination.Halida Boughriet's original photographic diptych, created especially for the exhibition to feed into these " 50 years of Algerian reflexion", is the first of its kind in France.

Presented in the style of an advertising campaign, it underlines the omnipresence of the female figure in the register of communication, whatever the targeted sales product. By bringing together, not without irony and provocation, an authentic propaganda poster and a fake advertising poster, the artist shows the blurred boundary between political and commercial messages and their common unconscious ideological background. During the debates that accompanied the introduction of the law banning the wearing of the full veil in the French public space in 2011, the aesthetic argument was often invoked, in a blatant yet often overlooked paradox with the supposed feminist aspect of the bill. In 50 years, the perception of Arab and Muslim women still seems to arouse just as much passion, between the desire to “liberate” them through constraint, and the desire to standardise them according to criteria whose universality is open to question. Have these 50 years of reflection really led to a change in perception? The female body, reduced to an aesthetic figure, still seems to be perceived as an object of desire and an ambivalent social issue. Véronique Rieffel (independent curator, art critic).