Galerie Regard Sud presents Farida Hamak‘s “Empreintes”. The images are accompanied by this text.
For several years, I have been traveling countries in the Maghreb and the Middle East in search of spaces undergoing rapid change for cultural, economic, and environmental reasons. Attaching particular importance to the place of women and their intimate space within these patriarchal, so-called traditional cultures, the human element is at the center of my practice, although it appears in the form of clues or brief apparitions. Continuing this artistic work, I wanted to discover the Tunisian territory in search of perceptible and elusive traces of the country’s complexity. Developing over the long term since 2022, the “Empreintes” project is built from my travels, from north to south, from the capital, Tunis, to the beginnings of the Sahara, along the coastline to the island of Djerba, where the sea seems to merge with the sky. From the silent beauty of the landscapes, I build a story around the history of the country; one where tradition confronts modernity and where nature must now coexist with an urbanism in full expansion or on the contrary abandoned. Far from clichés and too noisy photographs, my images are constructed without premeditation, grappling with reality and revealing the simplicity of a shared moment or the detail of an abandoned architecture. My crossed gaze, coming from my dual Franco-Algerian culture, thus focuses on what could usually constitute the off-screen. Silent in their composition and play of light, my photographs seek to reveal the distant sound of a breeze, the murmur of a discussion between women of the same family or the clattering of water in a still-filled basin. Empreintes is thus composed of fragments of stories of contemplative intensity for each image, allows the narrative to construct itself. This territory, laid bare in a modest and poetic manner, reveals to us its singularity and its beauty, but also its unspoken and unrevealed interstices; markers of its contemporaneity.
Farida Hamak
Farida Hamak : Empreintes
September 18 – November 15, 2025
Galerie Regard Sud
1/3 rue des Pierres Plantées
69001 Lyon
Tél +33 (0)4 78 27 44 67
www.regardsud.com
