Edition 2016

Artist presented by Mouna Mekouar

Basma Alsharif

Trompe l'oeil

Basma Al Sharif’s work slips between the fault lines of history to reveal moments, places, and real or fictitious events. Constantly navigating between past and present, she sets out to reconstruct moments from life, to tell stories, imbued or not with real and imaginary memories. A visual writing, with hybrid forms and combinations, emanates from this interplay of incursions between individual and collective memory. The artist plays with the manipulation of images, the use of different techniques, and montage and sound collage so as to create visually strange collisions.
Mouna Mekouar

My work is deeply engaged with the human condition in relation to nationalism.
Employing photography, film, video, sound, and text, my interest is in the gaps and slippages that occur through representation and the violence, apathy and pleasure that it produces. I engage with politics on a visceral level through pieces characterised by their immersive, lyrical qualities, creating familiar environments that lure us into unsettling experiences.
Domesticity, history, and intimacy are referenced in a work focused on the experience of violent history tempered by representation.
Trompe L’oeil is an installation that takes over the space of the exhibition to re-establish it as a room in which all the elements that comprise the mise-en-scene are careful disruptions of a scene. Housing the ghosts of an ugly history that finds itself in the present, the work explores the essential function of photography today as archive, as history, and as a representation of the present and a vision for the future.
Basma Alsharif

Prints by Processus, Paris.
Framing by Circas, Paris.

  • Institutional partners

    • République Française
    • Région Provence Alpes Côté d'Azur
    • Département des Bouches du Rhône
    • Arles
    • Le Centre des monuments nationaux est heureux de soutenir les Rencontres de la Photographie d’Arles en accueillant des expositions dans l’abbaye de Montmajour
  • Main partners

    • Fondation LUMA
    • BMW
    • SNCF
    • Kering
  • Media partners

    • Arte
    • Lci
    • Konbini
    • Le Point
    • Madame Figaro
    • France Culture