Monia Ben Hamouda Tunisian, Italian, b. 1991
8.27h × 11.69w in
The drawings in the series Rage Moving Through Generations unfold as visual narratives charged with tension and movement. Working with highly pigmented pastel chalks and black ink, blurred, smoky clouds of beige, orange, and red are combined with sharp, dynamic ink lines. Each drawing develops its own rhythm, like a dance of energy evoking fire, smoke signals, or flickering sparks. There is something threatening in them, but also something deeply calming, like staring into the flames of a campfire at night.
Through these works, drawing asserts itself as a medium of its own, and as a space to explore questions of destruction, transformation, rage, and powerlessness, and the strange power that can emerge from them. The process began with a vague idea of burns, holding onto that image throughout. In a time when ideological fires seem to ignite with frightening ease, these drawings bear witness to a certain urgency (to anger, to exhaustion) but also to the possibility of reflection, to the quiet memory that even in destruction there can be an opening, a new beginning.
They are drawings of smoke, of what remains when something has burned, or tried to extinguish itself. Signs of combustion that give new form to what once was gas, movement, or loss.