19 - Amira Lamti - Bent El Machta

Jul 6, 2026 – Oct 4, 2026

In Bent el Machta, Amira Lamti explores ritual as a space of transmission, transformation and negotiation. Drawing on the central figure of the Machta, guardian of wedding rites in the Tunisian Sahel, the artist goes beyond mere ethnographic documentation to create a performative reactivation. Her work, akin to a form of archive of gestures and memories, combines photography, video and textiles to extend, activate and bring into tension the tradition of marriage. Through a deliberate fragmentation of the real, Lamti isolates and reconfigures gestures, postures, details and traditional scenes, revealing the layers of memory and affect that permeate the nuptial rite. This attention to “what remains” of this ancestral practice echoes Georges Didi-Huberman’s ideas about the survival of the gesture, whereby images retain traces, while re-configuring them. In Lamti’s work, photography thus becomes a space where the past infiltrates the present through displaced forms. The truth that emerges is neither stable nor univocal. It is dynamically self-constructed in the in-between; between heritage and contemporary experience, transmission and individual reappropriation. This instability is notably embodied in the presence of the artist’s brother, photographed wearing attributes traditionally associated with the feminine, thereby displacing codes and revealing the ritual’s malleability. Ritual thus becomes a terrain of transformation, where roles, bodies and symbols are redefined between continuity and rupture, visibility and restraint, memory and invention. Lamti thus proffers a truth in the making, situated and sensitive. Her photography is performative, opening up a field of possibilities rather than cementing tradition. In the exhibition’s framework, Amira Lamti affirms that the deepest truth lies in what endures but also transforms, in the active survival of gestures and rituals, which, somehow archived, continue to act silently on our bodies and our imaginaries. Nadine Hounkpatin