Sara Ben Amar
ALGERIA
La piel que quiero habitar/the skin I want to live
As a teen, I used to constantly pick at my skin and had lots of blemishes as a result. My mother would tell me to stop fiddling with my pimples because my face had become « like a baghrir ». A baghrir is a North African crepe with many holes in it. I could not for the life of me be seen without foundation until my early twenties.
A few years later, my aunt told me of a woman sh met when having botox. That woman told her she would spend her whole monthly income on skin procedures.
La piel que quiero habitar/the skin I want to live in investigates the recent surge in cosmetic medicine in Algeria and its increasing banalisation. It seeks to understand why people —mostly women— across all social classes and age groups are having non-surgical cosmetic interventions on their skin. How do they feel about themselves and how far are they willing to go to achieve youthful skin or ever shifting beauty ideals? How has this become so commonplace and why has it become commonplace now? How did we go from a decade-old beauty salon-based skincare industry to a medicalized one? What is it that patients are trying to fix or improve? Where is the line between practices of self-care and signs of body dysmorphia? In many ways, this project is not about skin, but about what lies beneath it. It is about the stories we tell about ourselves to ourselves and to others.
Born in 1994, Sarah Ben Amar started practicing photography when her father gave her a compact camera at 17. She continued photographing throughout her studies in British and American literature and history. She also became interested in film during that period.
Her primary focus is on the relationship between the collective and the individual and how space shapes or mirrors that relationship. Ben Amar has been a resident in the 13th edition of ARTIFARITI (Western Sahara), as well as in the Derb Cinema documentary film residency (Tlemcen, Algeria). Her project Sandcastles (2019-2024) has been awarded the Tasweer Qatar’s 2023 Sheikh Al Thani Project Award. In 2024, she became a mentee with Through The Lens Collective.