Exile des anges, Halida Boughriet blends photographic staging and pictorial construction to create portraits that question the boundaries between image and narrative. This work is part of an approach designed to go beyond historical divisions in order to question identities, arousing both historical and social unease. It provokes a dialogue or a detour of symbols linked to hidden memories, often ignored or repressed by official history. The artist aims to revive these memories by using imagery as a means of raising awareness, so that these memories become vectors of resistance to the absence of historical recognition and to processes of stigmatization.
In this series, faces from the diaspora convey both a deep intimacy and a sense of urgency, capturing the pain and complexity of their emotions in a troubled contemporary context, as if to bring out often invisible scars. The bodies, illuminated by artificial light, unconsciously adopt postures and gestures evoking archetypal figures, in the image of Caravaggio's works. The archive thus reveals the construction of the African colonial myth in its entirety, interrupting the traditional narrative and fracturing our perception of history.