TUNIS — It was early spring in Tunisia, and shockingly shiny bougainvillea have been exploding, the sky was a shiny cerulean blue, and the Mediterranean a span of infinite turquoise. That riot of vibrant shade exterior was additionally discovered inside, on the B7L9 Artwork Centre, host to The Birds Are Chirping Above The Tree, the primary solo exhibition of the late Algerian artist Hamid Zénati in North Africa, the place he lived and labored. It’s a thorough, dynamic present, spanning over 5 a long time of each Zénati’s work and people of contemporaneous artists, establishing the interconnections of the modernist motion in North Africa.
Hamid Zénati (1944–2022) was a self-taught artist born in Constantine, Algeria, beneath French occupation. After shifting to Germany as a younger man, he labored primarily as a translator. He made artwork between diversified jobs, compulsively marking any floor obtainable with vivid geometric and natural shapes in his self-described “all-over” fashion.
This exhibition demonstrates that vary of inventive output, together with textiles, discovered objects, wearables, and ceramics. Zénati primarily employed a course of much like monoprinting or stamping, utilizing reduce and painted stencils made out of paper, cardboard, foil, and different supplies to print and repeat varieties in diversified colours. Within the ensuing works, vibrating colours work together in choreographed preparations of shapes receding, advancing, and overlapping, set inside an intense chromatic rhythm. Missing a focus or directional orientation, and all untitled, the compositions recommend a continuation past the item itself, in direction of an infinite repetition.
Hamid Zénati, Untitled work (undated), hand-painting and printing on material
The exhibition title, The Birds Are Chirping Above The Tree, references a household anecdote in regards to the first phrase a younger Zénati discovered when he was covertly finding out Arabic, which was outlawed throughout French Colonial rule. He would additionally grow to be fluent in Darija, French, Arabic, English, and German. To me, Zénati’s visible cacophony alludes to collisions of language: the tongues during which one thinks and speaks and people of 1’s surroundings all actively co-existing and jibber-jabbering. These shapes and colours really feel like excerpts of that soundtrack, alternatively shrill, melodic, loud, whispered, and guttural; typically tightly orchestrated, and typically wildly chaotic.
Good curatorial selections by Nadine Nour el Din with the help of Anna Schneider amplify Zénati’s manic art-all-over aesthetic — the area is splendidly crowded, layered, and full of labor in every single place you flip: on partitions, atop pedestals, and hanging in area. The exhibition design can be a intelligent nod to the best way that Zénati typically offered his work. Missing entry to conventional venues, he typically created impromptu cellular exhibitions, packing work right into a suitcase for public show, and typically performing with these packed textiles.
Hamid Zénati, Untitled work (undated), hand-painting and printing on material
An adjoining gallery presents a biographic view of Zénati by way of a set of non-public images, rugs, and books that time to his wide-ranging, eclectic influences. A range from his document assortment performs within the nook, and the olfactory artist Dana El-Masri was commissioned to make two scents for the exhibition, offered in lidded ceramic bowls. One, known as “Nafs (Self, Spirit, Breath)” (2025), is supposed to evoke the artist himself by way of a mixture of amber, tobacco, and Somali Frankincense. This space of the exhibition felt very intimate, virtually like a studio go to; the private objects create a way of the artist as an entire individual, and symbolize a extra creative approach of exhibiting biography than simply wall textual content or timelines.
To light up the change of concepts and influences which have been shifting by way of the area in his lifetime, the curators additionally chosen works representing contemporaries of Zénati, together with Souhila Bel Bahar’s unfastened and summary botanical compositions; Nja Mahdaoui’s fantastically structured graphic calligraphy; and a number of works by Dia Azzawi, whose theoretical and aesthetic concepts on contemporaneity have influenced a variety of Arab inventive colleges of thought. Certainly, this exhibition isn’t only a reassertion of a singular artist, however an necessary addition to the document of an lively, interconnected, modernist motion in North Africa.
Set up view of The Birds Are Chirping Above The Tree (all images Dahlia Elsayed/ Hyperallergic)
Hamid Zénati: The Birds Are Chirping Above The Tree continues at B7L9 Artwork Centre (La Marsa, Tunisia) by way of July 20. The exhibition was curated by Nadine Nour el Din with Anna Schneider.
