Where ATHR coheres around a gendered and generational lens, Selma Feriani has opted for multiplicity, bringing together works by Zineb Sedira, Monia Ben Hamouda, Nidhal Chamekh, Nadia Ayari, Yann Lacroix and Aymen Mbarki. The diversity of media – sketches, paintings, sculpture and lightbox – allows for a field of enquiry that traverses personal desire, ritual gesture, postcolonial reflection and material experimentation. Convergence and dissonance hold a delicate balance here.
Within this constellation, Tunisian-American painter Nadia Ayari’s Safe Word and Tight (2016) stands out for their sumptuous meditation on submission, restraint and the politics of form. Ayari’s paintings from this period drift between abstraction and narration, centring vegetal motifs. A fig, branch and leaf are suspended in darkness, rippling as dense fields of plum, turquoise and brown. The fig captures multiple meanings, from its sensual and biblical associations with fertility and concealment to its contemporary readings as a metaphor for gendered visibility. Ayari renders it as a luminous sphere, at once ripe and sealed, its surface smooth yet quivering at the edges. Through layered oil that catches the light, she transforms the fruit into an emblem of controlled desire. The painting’s tactile density mirrors its conceptual tension: seduction contained within structure, impermanence captured through precision.
Monia Ben Hamouda approaches ideas of containment and release through her own material logic. Working with charred steel, cloth, earth pigments and spices, she enacts what she has termed a “shamanic” process – a way of reconnecting with, and contesting, the cultural legacies of her Muslim background. In her new large-scale painting, A Burst of Light IV (2025), gesture functions as exorcism, with heat, abrasion and layering performing a ritual undoing of expectation. Her richly textured surfaces, swirling, burnt and marked, carry cultural lineage but break from it within the same frame.
Ayari and Ben Hamouda toy with symbolism and ritual, but Nidhal Chamekh’s offering is overt. His Frictions (2024) series stages collisions between Greco-Roman statuary and West African masks, creating hybrid physiognomies that unsettle the conventions of classical form and exhibition. In the works presented here, wood and marble meet through clean incisions, their contact points exposed. The tension arises from what is rarely seen together: two aesthetic systems that Western taxonomy has long kept apart. The resulting faces feel both continuous and fragmented, their unease magnified within the fair context, where clarity of authorship and category are prized. Drawing on Édouard Glissant’s concept of relation, Chamekh reimagines hybridity as a state of productive opacity, an encounter that resists hierarchy while insisting on interdependence. It is work that confronts, reminding us that history is an unstable terrain of control and collision.
Across these presentations, artists are working from lived worlds rather than the panoramic frames that typically organise fair discourse. Close range yields a distinct material logic – modest media carries dense histories, small forms enclose structural pressures and fragile substances bear conditions that far exceed their scale. The emphasis lies on proximate habitats and inward states, on how gendered expectations, domestic, ritual and colonial forms continue to ripple through the present at the level of surface and affect. An attentiveness to the physical traces by which legacies remain legible runs through the works: the domestic residue of Beirut, the architectures of spectatorship in Saudi Arabia, the ritual negotiation of lineage and the inherited collisions of classical and colonial taxonomies. Each of these positions asserts that the present is apprehended through surfaces and structures still bearing historical weight.
