Halida Boughriet

Ruine attempts to reinvent the notion of living in a closed and isolated space. The place of reference is a forced-labor concentration camp built in the 1950s in Gradishte, Albania, where thousands of deportees and downgraded citizens of the former autocratic Albanian communist regime were forced to live for decades. Gradishte is a ruin today, doomed to general amnesia, though there are people who still live there. Halida Boughriet revives its memories and casts them in concrete. What is it like living in exile in your own country? What if such a place is the only one you recall as your childhood home? The soundtrack plays a poem by a now 45-year- old woman, born and raised until the age of 17 in the Gradishte camp, who tells of her coming back to this place 27 years later.

Halida Boughriet (1980, Lens, France). She works with performance, sculpture and video installation. At the crossroads of aesthetic, political and social concerns, her work aims to capture the tension in human relations and society, with a particular focus on emotions conveyed in individual and collective memory.