"Ifriqiyettes" at the "Musk and Amber" Gallery

by "Alia Derouiche Cherif"

Exhibition date: September 28th, 2018

The exhibition "Ifriqiyettes" by Alia Derouiche Cherif

They are called Zanoukha, Mahbouba, Beya, Arbia, Bakhta, Kmar, Atka, Tofaha,...

They are all there in front of us, princesses of the suburbs, the countryside, princesses without title but with names so singing.

They emerge from our imagination, from distant postcards where the vision of the East was through odalisques with dark eyes that met the demand of a West in full Orientalist wave.

But these women were real in Morocco, Tunisia or Algeria, women of the people, simple, sometimes on the fringe, but real with their heavy jewelry and their Berber tattoos.

To give them their place, Alia Derouiche Cherif gives them a second life by magnifying them.
Around more than forty portraits, taken from the photographs of Geiser, Boumendil, Besancenot, Neurdein, or Lehnert and Landrock, she revisits the image offered.

These images, which for the most part are part of a photographic heritage, seem familiar to us, but when the gaze stops and focuses on the details, the viewer is carried away by the richness of the motifs and the mastery of the cameos of color.