Three Tunisian Women Artists

By Michèle Cohen Hadria

Michèle Cohen Hadria interviews Nicène Kossentini, Mouna Karray and Moufida Fedhila three women artists living and working in Tunisia today. The interviews discuss the work of these artists since the revolution and feature a discussion of artistic creation against the political backdrop of contemporary Tunis

• Language: English
• Publisher: KT press
• Release date: Sep 10, 2013
• ISBN: 9780953654185

Book preview

Preface

It is a crossroad of artistic, critical and biographical interests which, sometimes, motivates any specific field of research. My interest, since 1998, has been in artists of the Arab World, and this was born as an emerging convergence between my critical practice and the desire to take stock of what happened in the Arab world, even though little was said in the pages of contemporary art magazines and there were, a fortiori, no monographs.

I began by investigating the photographic medium and, for the magazine Art Press for which I worked then, I began a project entitled ‘And the Arab photograph?’ This project could not be completed but it was only a few years later, in the 2000s, that Georges Pompidou Centre, in a somewhat similar tone, chose as the provocative title for one of their exhibitions So, China? At that time, I pointed out in the Canadian art magazine, ETC, that the sudden interest of the West in the fields of Indian and Chinese art coincided with their importance as emerging powers. In other words, any interest in the former colonies, now independent, was still considered under the sign of Western powers and, and these countries considered as peripheral, were still biased, against Western references. While academic works appeared, in which the Anglo-Saxon authors, or French, spoke of the delay or the reluctance of France to consider issues related to postcolonial studies and gender studies. Republican rigidity? A unique universalism? Colonial history? Imperial repression? Probably.

One day when I looked at a photograph of melancholy faces of young Moroccan students in a drawing class, taken by their master, Hicham Benohoud, I suddenly realised a convergence between the story that I witnessed and my own biography. That melancholy, although of different origin as it was at the time of Morocco Hassan II, was similar to that I had read on the faces of young Tunisian classmates, when as a child I attended the High School Carthage, Tunisia. This is where some thirty five years later, I realised that it would be necessary to go beyond an in-depth article or a magazine issue, and try to write a book about contemporary Arab artists. But not only. I wanted to go beyond the borders of the Maghreb to interrogate the contemporary art of other countries in the Middle East: Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq, Syria, Libya (at least if I could ... ). More importantly, I wanted to go beyond this being only about the whole Muslim world, including the often controversial works of artists from Iran and Turkey. The further I went into this project, the more my field expanded, but it also deepened in the diversity of its facets, and this led to explorations of differences between one country to another, and their sometimes unexpected paradoxes and anachronisms.

I took fifteen years to take note of this diversity, while trying to reconsider and search all unconscious colonial residue that was inoculated in me, in my childhood in Tunisia when it had been a French protectorate. It was a hard task and I spent fifteen years attempting to write such a book project hindered by trying to seek an objective critical approach, not only because the fields covered were vast and diverse, but also because I was afraid of detecting colonial residues within my unconscious way of thinking.

Along the way, I took note of the importance of two major types of investigation, on the one hand, gender issues in the Arab countries, and, on the other, the issue of discharge of an Islamic culture that had enjoyed, in its past founding civilisations known over centuries. For, the Islamic world itself obeyed a specific universalism that was exercised in the former Arab Spain (Al-Andalus), in the Indian subcontinent, through the Kingdom of the Persians and later by the Ottoman Empire. Through Al-Andalus, there was also a scene of a golden age bringing together Arab and Jewish philosophies, another convergence which crossed the reality of my Jewishness. Of early Spanish Sephardic origin, I felt full in the face the situation of contemporary Palestine, with strong and painful feelings. In fact, I began to feel that centuries of collective unconscious connected me to Arab cultures.

As shown by another researcher of Tunisian Jewish origin, Sonia Fellous, in her book Juifs et musulmans en Tunisie, Fraternité et déchirements (Paris: Editions Somogy/ Livres d’art, 2003), there are points of affinity between Jews and Tunisians enameled in their long peaceful coexistence, but also highlighted in their sporadic and chronic conflicts. To continue the story of another historian of Tunisian origin, Sophie Bessis, whose writing also affected me, I found myself in the introduction to her book, L’Occident et les autres, histoire d’une suprématie (Paris, 2003) through her description of small French schoolgirls, blondes, and the contemptuous faces of their fellow Arab and Jewish schoolchildren, all so very dark brown in skin colour and almost indistinguishable from each other, despite belonging to different cultures.

It is probably for this reason that the melancholy of Moroccan students photographed by Hicham Benohoud also seemed a little like mine... despite the generational gap that separated me from them. My sense of familiarity with Arab culture and time, the insoluble conflicts of conscience faced because of the question of Palestine exposed me to the tribulations that punctuated my research while developing and enlightening myself. Along the way, I realized that the inequality of the French Protectorate which I had witnessed during my childhood in Carthage High School – but also in civilian life – had been buried by the of history in the wake of Independence and especially after 1956, in Tunisia (when I had been only six).

A new generation of Arab artists in the late 1990s, struggled to make themselves known in the West, totally uninhibited, facing colonial liabilities that only their mothers had probably known, and who had like, perhaps, some of my classmates been the oppressed comrades. If the memory of this oppression was part my research, I often think now with hindsight, that it unwittingly tended towards a kind of redemption. In vain. The story had mutated and the presence of these young artists of the Arab world, with whom I spent time and in whom I often found friends, told me that the reality was far more nuanced and that these memories of a Manichean and xenophobic colonial history, with which I was then preoccupied, were totally overwhelmed.

From the 2000s, linked to their oil wealth, a new business model has had an influence on Arab artists from all countries as they began to converge fairs and contemporary art biennials on the Arabian Peninsula. My argument in their favour now seemed obsolete (although I harbored some reservations against an art market co-habiting with authoritarian governments). For its part, the Western art market adopted some of these artists, following always the same strategies in relation to that of the newly rich and powerful countries.

The only strictly contemporary option left me (since I had been, in fifteen years, overtaken by history) that seemed to represent a still unfinished questioning, otherwise unachievable, was the status of women and the Arab woman artist.

This is what we talk about in these interviews with three young Tunisian modern women. I have had a long experience of listening to Arab artists, and it is an appreciation of their highly nuanced and tolerant positions which has carried me forward, dissolving gradually my own position away from the dichotomy West/East, inherited from colonialism. A free and conscious speech. Political speech in the broadest sense, and as a complex word, in stories full of subtleties and relativities that could only come from their experiences. Through this present collaborative work, I ended up purifying so to speak my childhood history and its heavy liabilities which hung like a burden.

Time was no longer in the past, rulers and other forms of authority have been reborn, like the thousand heads of a hydra,