Selma Feriani Gallery is pleased to present Rituals of Fracture. This curated project sheds focus on our local contemporary expression, exploring the poetics of fracture, both materially and conceptually, bringing together the works of three contemporary Tunisian artists: Monia Ben Hamouda, Mohamed Amine Hamouda, and Nidhal Chamekh. Positioned at the intermediacy of personal and collective histories, their individual practices meditate on rifts and continuities through notions of identity, ecology, and politics. Through Ben Hamouda’s large-scale, sculptural-like paintings, Chamekh’s charged assemblages, and Hamouda’s ecological interventions, our proposed installation considers how fracture becomes a critical tool for inquiry and creation through polyphonic lenses.
At the center of the booth, Monia Ben Hamouda presents a monumental, wall-sized painting split across two canvases. Her work navigates generational Muslim heritage through a visceral, performative process, using spices, soil, and clay to create gestural compositions that evoke ritual, protection, and transformation. The large-scale, wall-sized painting explores the narrative construction of art history and articulates links between architecture, physical and spiritual protection, sacred imagery, and space. Painted through 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.
Extending this material language, Mohamed Amine Hamouda’s practice engages with the fragile ecosystem of the Gabès oasis—the only maritime oasis in the Mediterranean. Through handmade paper works produced from vegetal waste, wool, cactus pulp, and native fibres, he foregrounds cycles of degradation and regeneration. His installations, often structured around the recurring motif of the palm tree, function as both landscape and self-portrait—embodying an endangered environment while proposing new imaginaries rooted in memory and resilience.
In dialogue, Nidhal Chamekh’s Frictions series interrogates historical and cultural constructions through assemblage. Drawing from Greco-Roman sculpture and African mask traditions, his hybrid forms challenge inherited hierarchies of representation. Carved wood, sculptural fragments, and patinated surfaces converge in dissonant compositions, exposing tensions between archaeological and ethnographic categorizations. Through these juxtapositions, Chamekh disrupts dominant narratives and reveals the complexities of cultural hybridity and historical continuity.