Halida Boughriet. Pandora’s Box

From 20 October to 11 December 2016, the Officine dell’Immagine gallery in Milan hosts the first Italian solo show of the Franco-Algerian artist Halida Boughriet (Lens, 1980), among the most talented voices of the emerging art scene.

Curated by Silvia Cirelli, the exhibition Pandora’s Box collects a vast selection of works never exhibited in Italy, in an attempt to explore the great versatility of a young performer who continues to surprise with a refined and incisive aesthetic, deeply attentive to the difficult dynamics of the inner universe.

Internationally known for exhibitions at the Center Pompidou or the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, Halida Boughriet loves to deal with issues related to socio-cultural problems, identity, behavioral and geopolitical issues which affect not only the African reality - to which it is closely linked - but which generally concern current cultural history, marked today, more than ever, from imbalances deriving from the sense of uprooting, the lack of communication between people and the need to "belong".

Starting from the use of the body as a fundamental expressive vehicle, the artist is distinguished by a clear preference for specific languages ​​that make performance their focal point. Reproduced with photographic series, or simply documented on video support, the performative actions present in her works - and of which Boughriet herself is sometimes the protagonist - capture, according to the artist, the authentic power of emotional ambiguities. In a precarious balance that mixes beauty and suffering, evasion and coercion, this young interpreter unmasks the tensions of human behavior, revealing its underground frailties.