Labes Project | Scenography, choreography and contemporary dance performance

Labes rehearsals
LABES is a choreographic creation by Selim Ben Safia with scenography by Nadia Kaabi-Linke. The piece explores fragility, resilience, and the silent marks left by places erased from the map. Inspired by the vanished Maghrebi Quarter, LABES rebuilds fragments of walls, memories, and disappearances through movement, space, and sound. On stage, four dancers — Ilyes Triki, Romane Piffaut, Mohamed Issaoui, Malek Zouaidi — and live musician Marie-Suzanne de Loye (viola da gamba) embody these disappearing and re-emerging landscapes. LABES is a poetic crossing between dance and visual art — a way of giving presence to what has been erased.
Choreography and dance rehearsal at Marseill for the lAbes project. Dancers rehearsing in an open space.
↳ Dancer rehearsing in Marseille

Featuring… On view @ ISAM Gabés from 3-10/11/2025

09.10.2025 – 06.12.2025
Featuring... has been presented at ISAM Gabès from 3 - 10 November 2025. The project was created during a residency at LA BOÎTE in 2024 and reconsiders roles within the art field, blurring the boundaries between artist and audience. For Kaabi-Linke, one key difference between artists and non-artists lies in memory. Artists preserve the creativity of childhood, while others often forget it, convinced they lack talent. Working with employees of a pharmaceutical company, she supported the realisation of their own artistic ideas. Featuring… is not a conventional artist’s journey, but a conceptual exploration of authorship, identity and shared creativity. Featuring features collaborative artprojects with Abir Ben Ali, Mohamed Hameda, Raouf Hamouda, Manel Naili, Safa Rahmen, and Sana Slama.
Featuring at Institut Supérieur des Arts et Métiers de Gabès (I.S.A.M)
↳ Port Cities: Fragments of Maritime Routes - The Beirut Edition at Beirut Art Center

Port Cities: Fragments of Maritime Routes – The Beirut Edition

09.10.2025 – 06.12.2025
This exhibition brings together new works by Mohamed Abdelkarim, Laila Hida, Nadia Kaabi-Linke, and Siska, four artists who approach the port as both material reality and metaphor. Their projects grew from residencies in Liverpool in 2024, where the artists engaged with the city’s maritime infrastructures and its entanglement in slavery, trade, and migration. Each returned to their own shoreline—Alexandria, Tunis, Marrakech, and Beirut—asking what it means to live with the sediments of these legacies today.  At Beirut Art Center, the exhibition extends the conversations sparked by the rooftop program Water In My Mouth, which used water as a lens to think about sustainability, fragility, and collective resilience. Here, those questions return to the shoreline, asking what kinds of imaginaries might emerge from the city’s liquid thresholds. Exhibition Dates 9 October – 6 December 2025 Beirut Art Center  Port Cities: A collaborative project initiated by Liverpool Arab Arts Festival and British Council MENA
↳ Port Cities: Fragments of Maritime Routes - The Beirut Edition at Beirut Art Center

Cities Under Quarantine: The Mailbox Project

28.08.2025 – 28.09.2025
Cities Under Quarantine: The Mailbox Project. The collaborative artist book project curated and edited by Abed Al Kadiri and published by Dongola Publishers will be on display at the Saudi Arabia Museum of Contemporary Art in Riyadh's creative hub, the Jax District. The opening will take place place on Thursday, August 28 at 6:00 PM at SAMoCA at Jax, Riyadh.
Mailbox Project Dongola Publishers in Riyadh
↳ Cities Under Quarantine: The Mailbox Project @ SAMoCA, Jax District, Riyadh

“Kula: Cuts” at the Begehungen Art Festival 2025 in Chemnitz

18.07.2025 – 17.08.2025
Kula: Cuts, 2023, at the former steam-power plant Chemnitz-Nord: The large-scale painting Kula: Cuts, 2023, will take part in the Begehungen Art Festival 2025 on the site of the decommissioned Nord lignite-fired power plant in Chemnitz. In the midst of this impressive industrial architecture, the 22nd edition of the art festival will take a forward-looking approach to burning issues such as resource consumption, biodiversity and climate change.
Kula: Cuts at Begehungen Arts Festival in Chemnitz 2025 in the former steam power plant Chemnitz Nord
↳ 'Kula: Cuts', 2023 in Begehungen Art Festival 2025

“All Along the Watchtower” in From Dawn Till Dusk at Kunstmuseum Bonn

03.07.2025 – 02.11.2025
Nadia Kaabi-Linke’s installation “All Along the Watchtower” (2012) is featured in the exhibition “From Dawn Till Dusk – The Shadow in Contemporary Art” at Kunstmuseum Bonn. Curated by Prof. Dr. Stephan Berg, the exhibition brings together around 40 international artists and explores the role of the shadow in twentieth- and twenty-first-century art. The show examines the shadow as an image-producing, media-reflexive element, tracing its evolution as a central motif in contemporary art—presented for the first time in this depth in a German museum.
All Along the Watchtower at Kunstmuseum Bonn
↳ 'All Along The Watchtower' 2012-2025 in 'From Dawn Till Dusk - Der Schatten in der Kunt der Gegenwart'

Solo Exhibition at Piero Atchugarry Gallery, Miami

14.06.2025 – 30.08.2025
'We Didn’t Know We’re Ready', curated by Silvia Cirelli: Piero Atchugarry Gallery is pleased to announce 'We Didn’t Know We’re Ready' by Tunisian artist Nadia Kaabi-Linke curated by Silvia Cirelli. The expressive journey of Kaabi-Linke delves into the complexities of human nature revealing an “architecture of pain” marked interdependent power dynamics and the struggles of mankind's vulnerability. Her work shows how people are affected by power, memory, and vulnerability. Memory is central to her work — it's the starting point for telling both personal and collective stories. Her artworks act like emotional records, helping us understand hidden parts of our culture today.
Exhibition View with different sized black squares on the wall, in the middle of the room a park bench, covered with bird spikes and in the front a matres springs covered in thistle.
↳ On the walls: 'Blindstrom for Kazimir', 2023. In the back: 'Protected Area', 2025. In the front: 'No One Harms Me Unpunished' 2012.

Group Exhibition at Arter, Istanbul

From 12.06.2025
'Under Pressure Above Water', Curated by Nilüfer Şaşmazer: The group exhibition Under Pressure Above Water brings together 33 works by 15 artists across various media, including painting, sculpture, and photography, in Arter’s entrance and lower ground floor galleries. Structured around two interrelated sections, the exhibition explores the anxieties provoked by the uncertainties and social injustices of our time, such as environmental disasters, global conflicts, migration, and economic instability. Tracing the impact of challenging social conditions and compounding crises on individuals, it focuses on the questions and propositions that emerge from this context through the expressive possibilities of art.
A dome-shaped wire mesh sculpture placed under a spotlight in an otherwise dark room.
↳ 'Smooth Criminal', 2012 in 'Under Pressure Above Water'

Group Exhibition at The Dalloul Art Foundation, Beirut

29.05.2025 – 15.08.2025
'Women at Work: Intersection of Fine Art and Craft'. Curated by Wafa Roz: Women at Work: Intersection of Fine Art and Craft is an exploration of the innovative and intricate ways in which contemporary women artists from across the Arab world channel the creative force born at the intersection of fine art and craft. Working across media such as textiles, ceramics, metal, painting, photography, and drawing, these artists engage with materials and technical skills in ways that defy and question the need for boundaries between fine art and craft.
Woman in movement, looking at a sequence of canvases, each painted in a different earthy color, hanging on a white wall in an exhibition space.
↳ 'Colors of Time', 2017, in 'Versiegelte Zeit/ Sealed Time', Kunstmuseum Bonn

Group Exhibition at Kunstmuseum Bonn

08.05.2025 – 07.09.2025
'Homesick for New Things, Traveling for Art', Curated by Barbara J. Scheuermann: In der gegenwärtigen globalisierten Kunstwelt gilt es als Bedingung, dass Künstler:innen sich ihrer privilegierten Position und der damit verbundenen Verantwortung bewusst sind, wenn sie auf Reisen gehen und interkulturelle Begegnungen suchen. Aus diesem Grund werden in der Ausstellung Werke mit Bezug zur Tunis-Reise nicht nur Kunstwerken ihrer Zeit gegenübergestellt, sondern auch Kunstwerken späterer Jahrzehnte, bis hin zur Gegenwart, die teils eigens für die Ausstellung entwickelt wurden. Die Ausstellung möchte so eine Brücke zwischen verschiedenen historischen Phasen schlagen und die anhaltende Relevanz von Kunst als Instrument zur Erforschung von Identität, Geschichte und kultureller Begegnung zeigen.
View of an exhibition space. A three video installation mounted on the wall. In front two stools for visitors to sit and what the videos. Nadia Kaabi-Linke Life Kitchen
↳ 'Life Kitchen', 2025 by Nadia Kaabi-Linke & Mohamed Hameda in 'Homesick for New Things, Traveling for Art'

Participation at Tasweer Photo Festival – 3rd Edition, Doha

20.04.2025 – 20.06.2025
'As I Lay Between Two Seas' curated by Meriem Berrada, offers a poetic exploration of belonging, identity, and home. Featuring works by twenty-five artists from the Arab world and its diasporas.The works presented each display a different expression of movement–whether physical, temporal, or forced. They resist linear narratives and stereotypical depictions of displacement and migration. Instead, they collectively form a new web of meanings and (hi)stories that add depth and contribute to the broader discussions on migratory movements, rapid urbanization, political upheavals, and the lived realities of exile.
Damaged photograph of people by the sea. Nadia Kaabi Linke Crashed Memories Twenty-Eleven
↳ 'CM#003 | Yellow Super Marine', 2023 at Tasweer Photo Festival - 3rd Edition, Doha

Residency at La Boîte – Centre pour l’art contemporain et l’architecture, Tunis 

04.02.2025 – 11.04.2025
Featuring... is a project that redefines the roles within the art field, shifting the dynamic viewers and artists. During my one-month residency in Tunis, I worked closely with six company employees. This series of performances and installations stems from a profound belief that every human is inherently creative. The distinction between artists and non-artists lies in memory: artists preserve the creativity they discovered in childhood, while others may forget, persuaded by the illusion that they lack talent. My deep conviction led to a journey of remembrance, resulting in stunning works. In this project, the employees became the authors, while I served as their instrument, bringing their dream projects to life — like a brush in the hands of a painter.
A white box placed in a dark room. Inside the heavily lit Box, the artist Nadia Kabbi-Linke sitting on a chair holding papers.
↳ 'Cube', 2025 by Safa Rahmen & Nadia Kaabi-Linke in 'Featuring...'