Dans son oeuvre artistique Héla Ammar ne cesse de creuser, d’interroger les notions de mémoire, d’identité et de temps.
The story begins with an impossible romance between the son of a nationalist who founded Tunisia's first republican party and a young Corsican woman in the 1940s.
During the protectorate, this forbidden love embraces the history of both Tunisia and France.
A game of "je t'aime moi non plus" that persists today. Love Letters tells the story of Héla Ammar's grandparents' romance, mirrored in a complex national narrative.
In her artistic work, Héla Ammar never ceases to explore and question notions of memory, identity and time. The notion of temporality that permeates Héla Ammar's work is correlated with the historical-political narratives of her country.
This work of memory, transposed to her reflection on time, is important to the artist beyond her plastic creation, and could be summed up in the adage "to know where we're going, we need to know where we've come from".
With the revolution in 2011, the need to find new points of reference became imperative. Héla Ammar then questioned national and family archives. According to her, "archives, as tangible traces of the past, or as receptacles of memory, often constitute a refuge value: we question memory to find answers about the present and the future."
Héla Ammar realizes the lack - or absence - of both personal and historical archives. The artist thus embarks on a meticulous quest, delivering a narrative from factual elements in order to "reconstruct a fragmented collective memory and thus weave a unified temporal field ».
