Hélène Amouzou

Hélène Amouzou was born in Togo, West Africa, in 1969 and has been living in Brussels, Belgium, for the last twenty years. In 2004, she went to study photography and video at the Académie de Dessin et des Arts visuels of Molenbeek-Saint-Jean. Photography has proved to be the medium best suited for her artistic research and technical experiments. She prefers to work with film, which she sees as demanding greater attention to detail. She creates her own distinctive and haunting imagery, which speaks to the contemporary issue of the people in exile and of those invisibilized. “Self-portraiture is a way of writing without words. My aim is to reveal the deepest parts of myself,” says Hélène Amouzou.

In her black and white photographs, Hélène Amouzou develops an essentialist approach in the staging of her body. In the series set in the attic of her house in Molenbeek, she claims her new environment, posing nude or with symbolic objects. Her aesthetic use of blurs and traces reflects the uncertainty of her situation. While Hélène Amouzou’s work recalls the fears experienced by many migrant women, her perspective is personal and introspective.