In 1974, Gil Scott-Heron declared, “The revolution will not be televised… the revolution will be live.” Revolutions take place in the street: they happen on the pavement, they burn, and they smell. Yet media outlets frame such events according to their own narratives. This was also the case with the uprisings in Tunisia, which were quickly branded abroad as the “Jasmine Revolution.” The label was anything but homegrown. Jasmine blooms only from May onwards, and its fragrance was entirely absent during those days. The real smell of the Tunisian revolution came from burning cars, houses, and the smoke rising from the clashes.
One year later, Tunisians continued to take to the streets to protest for freedom and human rights. This time, however, the demonstrations were directed not against an autocratic regime but against regressive Salafi movements, representing the rise of Islamic extremism in North Africa. Their black flag, bearing the white calligraphy of the Shahada, had become a new symbol of political coercion.
Smell consists of jasmine blossoms embroidered onto a black cloth echoing the Islamic creed. As repression persists, the flowers dry, wither, and lose their scent. The work confronts the dissonance between symbolic purity and the realities of ideological violence.
One week before the closing of the exhibition Chkoun Ahna, a group of over one hundred Salafists attacked the Printemps des Arts fair in La Marsa, a suburb of Tunis near the National Museum of Carthage. Artists were accused of blasphemy and profanation and even received death threats. The government showed more understanding for the looters than courage to uphold freedom of expression. The Minister of Culture and Heritage even disguised censorship behind calls to “institutionalize the protection of the Sacred” in the new Tunisian constitution.
In the aftermath, Kaabi-Linke decided to donate Smell to a staff member of the National Museum of Carthage who appeared to be a Salafi. Upon first seeing the work, he said that it expressed what he carried in his heart and asked whether he could have it once the exhibition ended.
After the show, when I handed the work to him, I asked whether the inevitable crumbling and disintegration of the flowers—sun-burned, powdered, and wilted—would trouble him. He said no; he would care for it just as he cared for his faith in God. Since the Shahada was rendered in jasmine blossoms on black cloth, he would simply replace the flowers as they decayed.
After the attacks and threats against artists in June 2012, I would never have expected a Salafist to be so committed to a piece of contemporary art. He did not see it as an object requiring conservation but as something worthy of devotion. While I understood Smell as a conceptual and critical work tied to the specific context of post-uprising Tunisia, he saw in it a personal affirmation of faith and universal religious truth.
It was striking to witness how easily opposing perceptions—holiness and profanity, critique and devotion—could converge in a single artwork. Once again, it confirmed the dialectical nature of art: that it always exceeds what one can see, feel, or hear.
— Timo Kaabi-Linke