Archive of Tunis Banalities

Collection of urban transfer prints

Tunis, TN Dubai, UAE
2009

Excerpt from Timo Kaabi-Linke, curator of Archive of Tunis Banalities (2009):

Nadia’s interest is embedded in the context of this vivid production of time. The Medina was one of several spots, like La Goulette, Al Kram, Carthage, and La Marsa, where she has researched, uncovered, and reproduced visual materials for the exhibition Archives of the Tunis Banalities.

In general, her pictorial work engages with the shifting of the past into the current time by retracing incidental and intentional marks, cracks, notches, and scratches, which are engraved and inscribed on the walls of public spaces. These “inscriptions” articulate contents of a collective sensibility, such as confessions of love, superstitions, insults and vulgarities, horrors and humor, desires and wishes, and, not least, homages to local heroes and soccer clubs.

Since most of these visuals escape our attention in the normal course of life, it would not be out of place to describe Nadia’s approach as a recovery of visual relics, which not only represent and stigmatize the particular socio-cultural environment but also depict the co-existence of the past in the current time we live in. These excavated visuals are far from being out of time; they just rest in our contemporaneity.

 

2-Dimensional

Media
Collection of 28 transfer prints with ink and wax on papers on canvas, pigments

Dimension
Dimensions variable

 

Collection
Burger COLLECTION Hong Kong

 

Exhibitions
But Still Tomorrow Builts Into My Face, Lawrie Shabibi, Dubai, 2016
Archives des banalités tunisoises, El Marsa Gallery, Tunis, 2009

Prints of marks on walls in public spaces, Archive of Tunis banalities, Nadia Kaabi-Linke, 2009

Detail

© Photo: Lawrie Shabibi 2009

Prints of marks on walls in public spaces, Archive of Tunis banalities, Nadia Kaabi-Linke, 2009

Excerpt from Nat Muller, curator of “But Still Tomorrow Builds Into My Face” (2016):

The exhibition But Still Tomorrow Builds Into My Face [TiKL] takes on a timely topic: the disappearance and loss of cultural and other types of heritage. The works explore the relationship between collecting, power, history, conflict, and identity. By snatching away subjects from the jaws of time and permanent loss, and by fixing them in memory, the works become poetic and political acts of preservation.

The title is taken from the poem The Pages of Day and Night by the Syrian poet Adonis, in which he describes the cycle of time passing and how tomorrow always comes even as he forcefully clings to yesterday. In her series of the same name, Danish artist Pia Rönicke shows photogravures of plant material taken from Copenhagen’s herbarium. Her selection is based on a cross-reference between plant samples collected during the 1760s Danish Arabia Expedition to Egypt, Arabia, and Syria, and the species that were recently sent for safekeeping to the Global Seed Vault in Svalbard, Norway, from the gene bank in Aleppo, Syria. The herbarium samples divulge data on plant matter as well as on the geo-political contexts they were collected in. They are what Rönicke calls a growing “collection of anticipation.”

Tunis-born Nadia Kaabi-Linke’s Archive of Tunis Banalities demonstrates her unique technique of wall rubbings. Like an archaeologist, she uncovers a specific urban memory and brings the streets of Tunis, prior to the 2011 uprisings, into the gallery space.

 

Exhibition View of  ‘But Still Tomorrow Builds into My Face’, curated by Nat Muller 2016

 

Installation view, Prints of marks on walls in public spaces, Archive of Tunis banalities, Nadia Kaabi-Linke, 2009

Installation view