Statement 2019
Transcription of the statement for the 21st Biennial
In my work, actuality and archive always interact. Past and present intertwine, there is no chronological or linear order. There is no cause nor effect. Past and present elements arise within each other, interact with one another, shed light, create ghosts… It is the same constellation; everything is distributed on the same map. This map is my piece of paper, on which there is neither perspective nor spatiotemporal unity. Everything is distributed as I go along, there is no sketch or final objective. It is all about nonlinear montage of images—one could say it is a “visual bricolage.”
Like any artist, elements such as my biography, family life and life experience go through my work. But they don’t interest me as the "objects" of my works. However, they intrinsically go through and even define my practice: just like the fact that the biographical and the political, the lived and the historical took the same place in my early life. Literature and science both defined me, as it defined each of my parents. Growing up in a dislocated, fragmented environment, having to tinker and do with what is there because of poverty. Later, leaving Tunisia and living out, seeing it from afar, feeling the complexity of the North–South relation and domination, the survival and the importance of the past and memory… all these elements constitute my personal and specific way of drawing
Art is fragile. Under new forms it experiments, dismisses, parasitizes and deconstructs what is structured, what makes up consensus or norm, and culture belongs to that. Art has maybe played a role in the Arab worlds. It constituted a powerful tool in de-constructing the internal and external forms of domination, including cultural domination, questioning such terms as “Arab Spring” or “Jasmine Revolution,” as well as other distorted orientalist representations.
But it is not always the case; for several artists it has been a struggle to get out of stereotypes, one of which being “Arab artist.”