Kaf w kaaba halwa

Or How to Meddle in Someone's Life

Tunis, TN
2023

Nadia Kaabi-Linke’s first institutional exhibition in Tunisia includes newly produced artworks that point at, hint, or give access to six different universes that overlap, collide, and interfere with our daily contemporary life. No one can observe, measure, limit, or determine these spheres, and, at the same time, no interpretation ever led to a satisfactory conception, description, or understanding. We content ourselves with blurry ideas and unconditional hope about these worlds and feel at their mercy when things don’t turn out as we want.

The exhibition collects leftovers from ephemeral pop-up universes, artifacts, images, shapes, and rituals. These objects from auratic spheres and arcane systems are simultaneously subjective and show paths to the powers of beliefs and dreams or lure into the world of spirits or the creative play of a dysfunctional technology. It also displays the fantasies of superstition, the delusions of bureaucracy, and the repellence of migration politics. With artworks related to topics such as bureaucracy (Squeezed in Infinity II, 2023), migration (No, 2012), dreams and beliefs (Ons, 2023), spirituality (Disarmed Metaphysical Objects, 2023, in collaboration with Vamarie Nanej), technology (Crashed Memories Twenty-Eleven, 2023), and superstition (Mare Crisium, 2020) Nadia Kaabi-Linke refers to her biography.

After more than twenty years of living abroad, she reflects on moments, events, and memories of the country’s younger history that more or less directly interfere with her biography. Throughout fifteen years of an international career as a multimedia conceptual artist, Nadia Kaabi-Linke always remained close to her Tunis origins. In 2023, she realized the dream of showing three biographically related solo exhibitions in places that relate most to her biography. Starting with the National Art Museum of Ukraine in Kyiv, followed by the National Gallery for Contemporary in Berlin, she now completes this year’s hat-trick with the exhibition in Tunis, where she graduated from the Tunis School of Fine Arts twenty-five years ago. Growing up between Tunis, Kyiv, and Dubai, her personal history developed through the migration across cultures and borders, greatly influencing her artistic practice. Her work gives physical presence to what tends to remain invisible in contemporary societies, be it people, structures, or the geopolitical forces that shape them. In a visually powerful way, she straddles beauty and violence, refinement and brutality, as well as the sublime and the vulgar, engaging the viewer in the play of conflicting forces of fear and attraction, repulsion and desire.

Her artworks were shown and are part of worldwide renowned collections, among which are the Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the M+ Museum in Hong Kong, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Sharjah Art Foundation in UAE, the Dallas Museum in Texas, and FRAC Pays de Loire, France. She had institutional solo exhibitions at Darat Al Funun in Amman, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Dallas Contemporary, Mosaic Rooms in London, and Calouste Gulbenkian in Lisbon. Her works have also been part of international group shows and biennials such as the Lyon Biennale, Bruges Triennial, Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Liverpool Biennale, Sharjah Biennale, Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin, Louisiana Museum, Denmark, Nam June Paik Art Center, Seoul, National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, KW Institute and House of World Culture (HKW) in Berlin. She was awarded the lthra Art Prize, the Francois Schneider Art Prize, the Art Basel Discovery Prize, and the Abraaj Group Art Prize, among others.

 

— Timo Kaabi-Linke

Exhibition

Media
Solo exhibition with mainly new works from 2023

Duration
21/10/2023 – 23/02/2024 (extended)

Location
La Boîte | Centre de l’art contemporaine, La Charguia I, Tunis

Links
La Boîte | Centre de l’art contemporaine

 

ONS, 2023, Site-specific interventional installation , Tunis, Nadia Kaabi-Linke

External even
ONS, 2023

Media
Site-specific intervention at the pool terrasse.

@
Former Megara Hotel, Gammarth, Tunis

©Photo: Kaabi-Linke Studio | TiKL / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2023