Tunisian-Italian artist Monia Ben Hamouda’s practice investigates processes of transmission, transformation, and material memory. Her work engages with inherited cultural and religious imaginaries through an embodied and process-based approach, in which gesture, repetition, and material action function as tools of inquiry rather than representation. They draw their power from the urgency of expression. Her visual language draws on symbolic forms, ritual structures, and systems of spatial organization. Large-scale paintings examine how images and surfaces construct meaning across time, exploring relationships between architecture, enclosure, protection, and the charged presence of matter. Pigment, spice, soil, and clay are not only visual elements but active agents that register contact, accumulation, and erosion.

These works frequently evoke stratification and sedimentation, recalling archaeological processes, sites of excavation, and the instability of what is preserved or lost. Surfaces appear at once built and uncovered, holding tensions between compression and dispersal, containment and exposure. Similar dynamics inform her paintings, where fading and layering operate simultaneously as acts of protection, concealment, and transformation.

Ben Hamouda’s practice also reflects on the historical construction of images and their authority. Trained within a visual environment shaped by Italian painting traditions, long associated with sacred architecture and religious power, she engages painterly conventions through materially driven procedures that emphasize density, friction, and surface disruption. For the artist, this process also operates as the casting of a spell, the formalization of a desire or the reconstruction of a memory. These works insist on the immediacy of gesture and the agency of materials, staging painting and sculpture as processes of accumulation, pressure, and release.