Tunisian-Italian artist Monia Ben Hamouda’s work navigates and confronts her generational Muslim heritage through what she calls a shamanic process — creating works that act as gestural exorcisms of the expectations placed upon her by tradition and the politicized present. The draw their power from the urgency of expression. Her visual language is steeped in cultural-religious symbology and rituals. Her large-scale paintings explore the narrative construction of art history and articulate the links between architecture, physical and spiritual protection, sacred imagery, and spaces. Painted by the force of spices thrown onto the canvas, and grounded in soil and clay, they operate at the intersection of love and sacrifice, crisis and fragmentation, and ancestral memory. The pieces evoke the familiar imprint of a homeland’s soil, alluding to archaeological sites and excavations in both theme and visual form. Themes of protection extend to her sculptural paintings, wrapped in spices and cloth, balancing preservation and transformation. For Ben Hamouda, iconography represents one of the sharpest contrasts in her Tunisian-Italian heritage. Growing up in Italy, immersed in Renaissance and Baroque portraiture, she was constantly confronted by painting’s European history. Her latest series, A Burst of Light (2025), features dark linen canvases infused with spices and powders such as hibiscus, green lalo, ashes, charcoal, paprika, red clay, and soil. Rooted in ritual and environmental concerns, these works challenge classical painting through raw, textural references to ancient rock and cave art. Her rapid, gestural process, scattering powders and layering brushstrokes, intensifies the urgency and physicality embedded in her practice.