Charif Benhelima's Semites

Charif Benhelima (°1967, Brussels) is an artist with Belgian, Sephardic and Arab roots. His oeuvre is a photographic investigation into identity and the sense of being an outsider. Apart from the subject matter, reflection about the medium is also an important aspect of the artist’s practice.

For the ‘Semites’ series (2005), Charif Benhelima used a Polaroid camera as his working tool. The Polaroid yields a one-on-one image: the moment crystallizes straight out into a photograph, which is the end result. ‘Semites’ contains 135 Polaroids of existing images (i.e. reproductions made with a Polaroid camera) in which the Polaroid’s flash is clearly visible. This light reflects on the original image and becomes visible in the end result, the Polaroid image.

‘In New York, to my surprise, I was faced with the fact that my name, Benhelima, is of Jewish origin. This has influenced my work “Semites”. With the Polaroid 600 as a tool and by questioning the concepts of identity and reality I developed what I call a “fake documentary work”.

By combining images of Jewish, Arab and Sephardic portraits and portraits of myself on a panel, I’ve created a personal document – a collage of images of conflicting identities which are contradictory and confusing. To create even more disorientation I have added light to the portraits, which, instead of emphasizing and illuminating the person’s appearance, rather blurs the details of their face. This connects with the vague memories we have of our childhood. The memories I have of my own parents are also rather vague.’ (Freely after a conversation between An Van Dienderen and Charif Benhelima)

Exclusively for the exhibition in Be-Part, Platform for contemporary art, the full series of 135 Polaroids has been converted into cibachrome prints, which are placed in an impressive ‘wall’, a wall under construction.