Tunisian-Italian artist Monia Ben Hamouda presents her first solo exhibition in France. Born in Milan, she grounds her practice in her Tunisian heritage and in the legacy of Islamic calligraphy transmitted by her father. Her monumental sculptures and installations weave together classical materials—metal, wood, linen—with spices that saturate the space in color and fragrance, adding a powerful sensory dimension to the aesthetic experience.
Engaging with the tradition of aniconism which privileges text and ornament over figuration, Ben Hamouda traces the resonances between the histories of Middle Eastern and Western European art. Drawing inspiration from Najdi poetry, a vernacular prose form that emerged in the Arabian Peninsula in the 16th century, she unveils a new body of work that approaches language as a state of constant metamorphosis. Poetry here moves like a voice in transit, transforming into matter and rhythm. Suspended in space, vast steel sculptures dusted with spices appear to defy gravity, inviting viewers into acts of reading and interpretation that hover on the edge of impossibility. The exhibition also includes two large-scale canvases, where the artist experiments with earth-based pigments of her own making. These commanding works immerse the viewer directly in the medium, reaching back through their raw materiality to the cave origins of painting. Within the art center’s sand-covered spaces, her works undergo a process of slow disappearance, reflecting on the passage of time and the strata of history.
Post-Scriptum invents a fertile space where untranslatability is not resolved but embraced, affirming the right to ambiguity and irresolution. The exhibition invites audiences to consider language as a vessel of memory, weaving a tapestry of stories that resist both simplification and erasure.
Press release from Centre d’art contemporain de la Ferme de Buisson
Image. Monia Ben Hamouda. Theology of collapse (The Myth of Past). 2024. Detail. Mixed media on iron and spices. 546 x 750 x 0.03 cm. Photography by Luis Do Rosario Image courtesy of the artist and the MAXXI foundation and the ChertLüdde gallery – Berlin
