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AB PROJECTS ZURICH
1 February - 10 March 2012

AB Gallery is looking forward to welcome you on the opening in the Gallery in Zurich on 1st of February 2012 at 5 pm.

Chafaa Fatima was born in 1973 in Algiers, where she currently lives and works. She practiced as a photographer for a few years, then resumed her studies at the Academy of Fine Arts of Algiers until 2006. Her work is a mixture of photographs and installations, on personal themes of ambiguity and ambivalence are the daily, the unconscious is dissected in a relationship of observer observed. Her installation, photographs, objects and paintings are an invitation to an interior observation of the contradictions of social norms; it raises questions about what is generally perceived as normal and acceptable. This creates an issue that refutes the idea ... limits the body clean / dirty body, violence / beauty, sublime / vulgarity ... A work inspired by the need for non-idealized, where the picture becomes a rejection of a stereotype of idea rigid and hierarchical.

"Perched on the hills of Kabylia, a mountainous region of Algeria, TAKAMRA is the village where my parents were born and brought up. It is one of three villages, equidistant from each other, which constitute the Arch (or tribe) of Ath marabout Sidi Moussa. According to local mythology the three daughters, of our ancestor Sidi Moussa, founded three villages to which they gave their first names, TAKAMRA, FETALA, and TAOURIRT.

That is why up to now, in the main room of each house in the three villages we find three rectangular holes dug in the wall that faces the door. These holes are the symbols of fertility and prosperity.
In 1956, the population of Takamra was decimated by the French colonial army for its support for the Algerian revolution. Thanks to my grandfather who was working in a farm owned by a powerful colonist, we had the opportunity to settle in the capital Algiers. At the independence of Algeria in 1962, the Algerian government offered a financial assistance to uprooted villagers to return to their land but in vain.

Today like many southern countries, the rural exodus towards cities has changed the sociology of the Algerian society; the Traditional rural society is destroyed along with its expertise, its culture, its humanism, and its oral heritage...
It is only in 2006 that I became acquainted with the village of my parents, for the first time. My photographic installation itself consists of a photo of the wall of the house of my grandparents, where there are three holes in which I place photos drawn from the family album.

In my installation, I set out the photos of my family who were born in TAKAMRA but had to leave it to settle either in Algiers or in France. The uprooting of peasants forced off their land, as this picture representing my father, who immigrated to France, where he worked as a laborer in the textile industry. He had a work accident where he lost a finger. The other picture represents my mother Ouardhia, who left her hometown at the age of 17, speaking only her mother tongue the Kabyle. In Algiers she had a French friend called Janet. Despite their differences a strong friendship linked the two women. Janet left Algeria in 1976."