There is an organic quality to Tunisia’s art scene, where art grows out of the loud, lively, chaotic energy that unsettles the city’s streets and motivates individuals who try to channel it into an artistic system. That’s no easy feat for a scene that can’t rely on any kind of government master plan, but only on a handful of people who set out on a mission to build something lasting.
Among those in the cultural trenches, the most visible internationally is undoubtedly Salma El-Feriani, who opened her new gallery in Al-Karam Industrial, near the port of La Goulette, in January 2024. The three-storey space has been operated since its opening with a scale and seriousness unparalleled in any European city. “I decided to build this knowing that most exhibition spaces in North Africa were pre-existing and had been renovated,” Friani told the Observer. “For the gallery, I wanted it to be purpose-built, with all the conditions required to be an exhibition space.”
It took two years and a partnership with architect Chacha Atallah, whose fingerprint is visible in every decision: the exterior refers to the hand-application technique traditionally used in southern Tunisia, made of concrete; The garden is planted with olive trees, palm trees and orange trees.
Reconstructing the country’s cultural narrative
The current program makes this argument through two simultaneous views. Nadia Ayari’s paintings occupy the main hall: large canvases in which plants and flowers acquire a menacing quality through repetition, appearing like weapons of some kind. The paintings speak indirectly about the state of alert and anxiety experienced by the contemporary world.
Next to the mezzanine, it displays “Frictions” by Nidal Al-Shamikh, an extension of his project “Et si Carthage…”, a far-reaching historical investigation of power dynamics across the two shores of the Mediterranean and their archetypes. It is clear that Feriani’s goal with the show is to pave the way for Tunisian artists to start a set of conversations that resonate globally but are deeply rooted here in Tunisia.
How could it be otherwise? Al-Feriani grew up in the blue-and-white cobblestone city of Sidi Bou Said, the daughter of gallery owner Issia Hamdi, whose “Blue Violin” represented the painters of the School of Tunis, the country’s main modernist movement. “I grew up among artists like Ali Balera, Ali Ben Salem and Rafiq Al Kamel. For our family, it was normal for us to be exposed to art or visit artists in their homes.”
She developed her international outlook after leaving at 21 to study finance in London, then worked in banking for four years before opening the gallery in Mayfair in 2009. “The impetus was the fact that none of the artists I loved, coming from the region, were adequately represented in London.”
Her return to Tunisia came in the wake of the revolution, and she, like many young Tunisians, felt that she had to participate in the country’s cultural renaissance. She initially established herself in a converted monastery in her native Sidi Bou Said. “I realized that having the exhibition in London and not having a platform in Tunisia was something missing from the puzzle,” she says. “It’s important that I have a strong connection to where I come from, and from there I try to reconnect with the rest of the world.”
“We do not ignore the market”
Given her previous financial background, Ferriani remains very straightforward with her business logic. “We don’t ignore the market, because what we do here is entirely funded by what we sell,” she says. The exhibition is a regular at Frieze, 1-54, Art Basel Paris, Abu Dhabi Art, and Art Basel Miami Beach.
The Middle East was the first international market I looked at. “When I started, the first international market was the UAE. Exhibitions in Dubai and Abu Dhabi became an essential part of our growth.” Asia followed as a longer game. “When you come from North Africa and go east to Hong Kong to tell your story, it takes time. You don’t go there to make money very quickly. You go there to build a relationship.” The United States is her next step, something she will no doubt handle with characteristic deliberateness.
Searching for other markets is not only a cultural task, but a necessity, since, as she readily admits, the base of local art collectors in Tunisia is small. However, its character is changing. The younger generation of art collectors, many of them from financial backgrounds similar to Frayani’s, approach collecting with a different logic. They track emerging artists early and understand the mechanics of the market. “They like to do what their parents did: buy this artist and see how things develop over time.”
The exhibition’s residency program at L’Atelier by Salma Ferrani exists in part to serve this relationship. The current artist-in-residence is Finnish-Tunisian painter Dora Dalila Schiffi, whose vivid canvases are reminiscent of the Fauves and Munch, analyzing the experience of being what Tunisians call “nus-nus,” meaning half-half, between cultures. “For this new series of paintings, I’m really looking at the archetypes,” the artist tells Observer. “I drew figures I saw at the Bardo Museum, but then I made them myself.”
Labuite and 32 bis
The logic of reaching new audiences rather than serving existing audiences is something Fatima Kilani has followed since 2007 with the La Boite Center for Art and Architecture. The center began with a 25 square meter space on the second floor of a building zoned for industrial areas in La Chargilla, which was originally a meeting room. “At that time, there were no art centers,” Al-Kilani says. “There were only commercial galleries. Media such as video, installation and performance were not visible at all in Tunisia.” The opening exhibition was a Fluxus-style show: employees from the host company walked up the stairs carrying clay objects they had shaped, arranged them on shelves and received a “certificate of free creativity” from the artist. “La Bouit’s DNA is the company: this ability of each person to produce art.”
What emerged from this first performance now extends to a major exhibition space, a studio, a dedicated video and film festival in Gabès, and satellite programs in chapels and universities. La Bouit’s current exhibition, “My Home is Le Corbusier (Villa Paizo)” by Italian artist Cristian Cerrone, fits into the centre’s longer fascination with Tunisia’s modernist architectural heritage.
Another pivotal building in the development of Tunisia’s contemporary art scene is located in the city centre, in a former Philips building dating back to 1953. The 32Bis art space acts as the city’s most visible experimental institution, committed to process, residency and the kind of thinking that precedes anything.
“The city center was the center of all cultural activity until the 2000s, when art galleries moved north to the suburbs. After the revolution, there was a comeback, and now there is a real transformation happening.” explains Hella Djubi, curator and director of 32Bis. This space is part of that transformation, privately funded by its founder and a circle of sponsors who have chosen not to receive any foreign funding. “It gives us a lot of freedom.”
Djubi describes a space whose programming is born organically, through encounters, through questions raised by one exhibition that open to the next, through the special quality of interest that comes from being embedded in a working neighborhood. The current resident, Lien Hoang Xuan, is an artist of Vietnamese and Tunisian descent, who is constructing a composite fantasy city she calls “South of Nowhere”: a mix of Tunisia, Saigon and Beirut — where she lived for a few years — rendered in drawing, print and video, and depicted with elegiac themes and a gold-leaf woodcut technique.
What Djubi describes as the center’s core mission is worth delving into: giving artists the freedom that the exhibition format, by its very nature, makes difficult. “Existing galleries work in a certain format, and artists end up producing within this logic of selling. A space like 32Bis gives more freedom on the level of production, thinking, and creativity.”
Yusr bin Ammar and the Phosphorus area
Elsewhere in the same coastal corridor, the creative phosphorus district of Bahar Azraq represents the principle of self-organization in its clearest form. It began, says Yusser Ben Ammar, whose exhibition anchors it, “in a very organic way. We were different people who stayed here spontaneously and we found that there was a very interesting potential between us.”
The name stems from the streets themselves: Avenue des Phosphates, which runs along the Avenue de l’Or. The area now hosts around 20 spaces bringing together galleries, design studios, architectural practices and the Nine Hotel, Tunisia’s first lifestyle hotel, created to accommodate the digital nomad population passing through Tunis.
In its own vein, Yusser Ben Ammar’s exhibition is a compact history of how the contemporary Tunisian landscape is constructed by individuals. It was originally opened in 2006 with a founding logic that Ben Ammar describes as clearly ecosystem-driven: “My goal was to work with established artists who would act as locomotives for younger, less established artists. Established artists pull others up.”
At a time when Tunisia did not have a public museum of contemporary art, the gallery did the work of education and institution simultaneously: “It was the work of a museum, a gallery commissioner and a gallery owner at the same time.”
She also observes, with apparent frustration, the structural gap that separates Tunisia from markets like Dubai or Casablanca: Tunisia’s expatriate community exists but has not yet bought in. She points out that “in Dubai, in France, and in Morocco, there are large communities of foreign collectors who invest in their works.” “In Tunisia, foreigners who come here to work are often transients. They are not collectors yet. But this has to change; we need more investors in culture.”
The challenges mentioned by Ben Ammar – from visa difficulties that prevent Tunisian artists from having their own openings abroad, to the absence of a Tunisian art magazine, as well as an economy that tests everyone’s stamina – are structural and unattractive. But they do not give in to resignation. “There is a real effervescence here. We have to keep pushing, because this scene exists, it is alive, and it is worth seeing.”
Both Ben Ammar and Al-Feriani believe that building the landscape can only be achieved as a collective project. “We all know that it is very fragile,” concludes Ferriani. “We work in a difficult environment, promoting artists in a place where things are not easy and inaccessible, all supported by the private sector. But we realize that we cannot exist together, unless we are stronger together.”
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