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.