Inès Bouallou is a photographer and poet. Her work focuses on gender and the body as a non-gendered object of research and study. Bouallou’s photographic approach, where the self-portrait is a major iconographic theme, allows her to distance herself from contemporary pictorial standards while reinventing old pictorial aesthetics whose value is based on the duality of self and other. Sometimes described as a painter-photographer, Inès Bouallou questions gendered identities through a self-portrait where her self multiplies to better deconstruct and desexualize the norms imposed by society. Constructed then deconstructed, manipulated then mounted from scratch, all that remains of their self-portraits are her manufacturing processes and a narrative framework that incorporates a notion of duration specific to the evolution of the body. Bouallou’s largely autobiographical work is the object of study for its non-binary and gender neutrality. Inès Bouallou is a member of the Moroccan collective Nassawiyat and a feminist activist.
Photo: © Micheal Danner