Biography
Born in 1984, Hela Lamine is a Tunisian multidisciplinary artist and lecturer at the Higher Institute of Fine Arts of Sousse.
Her practice encompasses installations, interactive performances, artist books, walking-based projects, virtual reality experiences, ceramics, and publishing. She has participated in numerous artist residencies and has exhibited her work in Tunisia, France, Morocco, the United Arab Emirates, Senegal, Austria, Spain, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy.
She currently lives and works in Tunis.
I feel a duty of memory
Research & Fiction
Process holds a central place in my practice — sometimes even more than the final result. The narratives I collect, the documentation I accumulate and archive, allow me to construct "open" fictions from real investigations.
Since 2010, I have developed a hybrid practice whose main subject is the human being through what they consume: food, social networks, politics, culture, tradition, identity. I am interested in the questioning the boundaries between the unique and the multiple, the matrix and the reproducible, the consumer and the consumed. I seek tocreate mechanisms that can generate confusion between what is given to be seen and what may hide within it — playing on the fragile limits separating these two territories, often with humour and self-deprecation, especially when dealing with sensitive subjects such as democratic transition, migration or the disappearance of intangible heritage.
Since 2019, working from my orchard-studio in Mornag, I have been imagining scale models, ephemeral immersive installations and virtual reality worlds focused on communication and connection with the non-human — and more specifically with trees. Convinced, now more than ever, that observing nature is fundamental, and fascinated by the intelligence of organisms without nervous systems — plants, trees, fungi — I seek in biomimicry other possibilities of life for humans on an earth disrupted by climate change, pollution and political decisions with dramatic consequences for living matter. I attempt to imagine the stages of a possible process of transformation or mutation that would be in perpetual evolution. It is in reality my own place within this ecosystem that I seek to redefine.
Inheritance
In my most recent solo exhibition "Les jardins de mon père," particular attention was given to the notion of heritage. I imagined a non-place, a space outside of time, born from the encounter between two practices: that of a biologist father and my own as an artist. Dreamed, imagined, traversed gardens — where characters, spaces and temporalities interweave.
A Duty to Remember
Today, I feel a duty of memory: the urgency to make better known what tends to disappear in silence, especially as everything accelerates — AI, climate change, the disappearance of ancestral knowledge, neocolonisation, the erasure of territories, the manipulation of attention. Because I am convinced that we protect better what we know than what we do not.
Sharing the Experience
Because one cannot fight alone — and even less so within the closed space of a gallery — I seek to make the artistic experience more accessible, through media such as illustrated books, video, immersive and interactive installation, participatory performance, limited editions, and in more open and accessible venues.
My scientific collaborations — such as the one with the Institut Pasteur in 2016 and more recently with designer Myriam Meliani — have led me to explore new mediums and to engage differently with living matter.