Charif Benhelima explores themes of origin, identity, representation and perception through photography. He gained recognition with his Welcome to Belgium series (1990-1999), a research project in which identity and the feeling of being an outsider play a key role.
Charif Benhelima is the son of an immigrant Moroccan father and a Belgian mother. He loses his parents early, as one is deported from the country and the other dies young. He is left in Belgium as a child with a foreign name and many unanswered questions. For a long time he struggled with his conflicting identities: the external identity (the feeling of being ‘foreign’) and his own.
