Omar D

Omar D's Devoir de mémoire / A Biography of Disappearance, Algeria 1992- (2007) is one of the most emotionally effective works in this exhibition. About fifty from among the hundreds of passport photographs of disappeared people, which Omar D collected over the years and in close relation to the families of those who vanished without a trace, are displayed in the gallery. This moving work is unique in its personal and political ambitions. The trauma of this especially dark side of the Algerian civil war is still repressed today; Omar D's book of the same title, published in 2007 in the UK, was never released in Algeria. The Algerian government has recently decreed an amnesty law that protects those responsible for the disappearance and torture. It forbids the families to keep on searching for the disappeared. The law obliges them to forget, under threat of legal action. The disappeared have thus twice disappeared: from social life and from memory as a victim.