THE INTERTWINED LEGACIES OF HÉLA AMMAR
BY FARAH ABDESSAMAD
Left: Legacy VII, from the series Legacy (2023)
Right: Legacy VIII, from the series Legacy (2023)
All images by Héla Ammar, Courtesy of the Artist
A legacy is both the pride we carry and the intergenerational violence we inherit. Tunisian photographer Héla Ammar channels this affective duality in Legacies (2023), which debuted during last year’s MENART fair.
In her series, Ammar plays with the visual codes of Orientalism to engage with the complexities of representation and erasure. Ten portraits feature a bejeweled Black model dressed in traditional, heirloom Tunisian outfits. The model stands or sits. Her womanhood is adorned with pre-modern feminine and masculine garments. Her outfits and accessories are haphazardly styled, stacked, and mismatched. Her face is obscured by the jewelry sets she wears, and we are left to wonder who she is while accepting her anonymous quality.
That mystery “allows a shift” in the way we consider identity, says Ammar. It also provokes a critical inquiry into fetishizing fantasies and projecting our own biases and demands onto the model. Where are the boundaries of her agency as a subject? Identity is visual, but it also encompasses intangible dimensions and subjectivity. Ammar’s composition refuses those external limitations. Her model slips away from our subconscious desire to have the images aesthetically please us and the urge to narrate her story.
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Legacy I, From the series Legacy (2023)
And outside the confines of a household, Ammar invites us to pause on a society, on the present of Tunisia, an increasingly authoritarian country struggling with its acceptance of diversity. Her images incorporate various symbols of Tunisian culture, from textiles to adornments to mystical calendars that pay homage to its variegated assemblage of Arab, Amazigh, African, and Islamic influences. They are superimposed on the model, who blends into an abstract language of belonging and into that past. In such a visual decorum, the model’s incarnated presence calls to embrace fluid and inclusive notions of identity and togetherness — an urgent, visceral, and nuanced response to today’s rising intolerance.
Portraiture is conceived as a subtle mirror. As composites of many layers and amid that landscape of entangled legacies, it’s crucial to look inward. Ammar reminds us that we can’t take the good without addressing the rest.
Legacy V, From the series Legacy (2023)
All images by Héla Ammar, Courtesy of the Artist
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