This summer, B7L9 Art Centre opens its doors to a space of memory and visual poetry.
From May 30 to July 31, 2025, we are proud to present, for the first time in Tunisia, the exhibition and book launch of Aisha by Yemeni-Egyptian-American photographer and filmmaker Yumna Al-Arashi.
As part of our summer programme, the entire top floor of the centre will be transformed— for the very first time—into a sensitive and immersive sanctuary.
Visitors will be invited to engage in a contemplative journey through heritage, memory, and identity, explored via the powerful, ancestral, and symbolic art of women’s tattooing.
Aisha is Yemeni Egyptian American photographer and filmmaker Yumna Al-Arashi’s first artist’s book. This powerful, delicate publication, inspired by Al-Arashi’s great-grandmother, Aisha, is an homage tothe lineage of women that she descends from; women of the multidimensional and many-layered landscapes of the MENA region.
Searching for an understanding of the tattoos that graced her great-grandmother’s body, Al-Arashi embraces the complexities of a symbolic matriarchal tradition.
Unable to visit one of her places of origin, the war-stricken Yemen, Yumna traveled across North Africa, from Tunisia to Algeria and Morocco, where she met and photographed a diverse group of women belonging more or less to the same generation: all standing, sitting, looking, moving and laughing with assuredness and joy.
By refusing the violence of selection and definition surrounding women’s practices, Al-Arashi publishes every single photograph from her journey in this 392 page monograph, moving the work into an ethereal cinematic celebration.
Al-Arashi’s images are gentle yet strong in composition, conscientiously connecting the woman to the land surrounding her and vice versa; they are incredibly rich in detail and color; and they are intimate, beautifully defiant and full of community and alliance.
Aisha also includes Al-Arashi’s writing and poetry in which she reflects on memories of her great-grandmother and the scent of oudh “that left a trail of magic wherever she floated in that home.”
In her genre-stretching texts, Al-Arashi also speaks on colonial archives, intergenerational storytelling and on the complexities of transnational female identity in patriarchal, capitalist, and imperialist societies at-large.
Press release from B7L9 Art Centre
Image: Yumna Al-Arashi. From the series Aisha. 2017. Image courtesy of the artist
