L’OEIL DU TIGRE: LES RENCONTRES D’ARLES

HEBA KHALIFA 

SPECIAL MENTION: LOUIS ROEDERER FOUNDATION DISCOVERY AWARD 2025 

Heba Khalifa, Wild, from Ain El Nimra (Tiger’s Eye) exhibition presented by the PRINCE CLAUS FUND, Courtesy of the Artist 

Heba Khalifa’s photo project is set in the cultural context of the city of Cairo, during her childhood. This period reappears in her present as the embodiment of a time suppressed due to trauma and pain, which is reworked using photo images as a way to cast light on the grieving process. The expression ‘tiger’s eye’ is used in Arab societies as an insult to refer to a particular defiant female gaze. 

Using experimental visuality, the artist explores the transgressive role of memory in triggering public debate around sexual abuse. As part of this debate, she resignifies her status as a victim, first as a place of enunciation where she can construct symbolic reparations towards herself, and subsequently as an identity that allows her to condemn the social pact that legitimates gender-based violence. 

Her visual journey explores childhood as a space made ominous by lived experiences in the domestic setting. By reinterpreting photos from her family album using photomontage and journalling, she reveals the complex role of family and religion as social structures for gender indoctrination. Meanwhile, the use of portraits allows her to symbolically search for her own face, which had gone missing amid the silence imposed by a strongly patriarchal society. 

The artist’s act of combining visual fragments of her childhood represents her intention to make amends to her body and pave the way for a new conception of herself in the present. Against this backdrop, photography offers support in the emotional healing process. Through her work, Khalifa reframes the expression ‘tiger’s eye’ as a gaze that embodies the active role that women can play in contemporary society in Cairo, allowing history to change course and life itself to be reinvented.