The Kamel Lazaar Foundation is pleased to announce the opening of The Birds Are Chirping Above the Tree, the first Maghreb retrospective dedicated to the Algerian artist Hamid Zénati (1944–2022). The exhibition will run from April 18 to July 20, 2025 at the B7L9 Art Centre in Bhar Lazreg, Tunis.
The Birds Are Chirping Above the Tree has been produced by the Kamel Lazaar Foundation in collaboration with the Hamid Zénati Estate and the Goethe-Institut, curated by Nadine Nour el Din, with the support of Anna Schneider and scenography by Bechir Riahi.
The exhibition title is drawn from the very first Arabic lesson learned by Hamid Zénati during his primary school days in Algeria. It stands as a return to his roots, a whisper from the dawn of his awakening to language, weaving indelible links between words, figures, places and memory.
The exhibition brings together an impressive body of Zénati’s work: hand-painted textiles, wall frescoes, sketchbooks, ceramics, photographs, garments and transformed everyday objects. These pieces engage in dialogue with selected works from the Kamel Lazaar Foundation collection and those of renowned artists such as A. Gorgi, A. Sahli, Baya, S. Farhat, N. Belkhodja, B. Dhahak, A. Farhat, M. Shili, A. Bellagha, Dia Azzawi, and Souhila Bel Bahar.Together, they compose an initiatory journey through the world of an unclassifiable creator.
Born in Constantine, a mineral mirage suspended in Algerian light, Hamid Zénati emigrated in the 1960s to West Germany and settled in Munich. A self-taught artist, he shaped a body of work free from any academic lineage, tirelessly exploring materials, forms, motifs and colours. Rather than embracing the norms of the art market, he built a world inhabited by memory and intuition, where each motif becomes a silent prayer, each colour, a living breath.
For Zénati, the motif is an ontological language, preceding It together the fragments of a scattered identity, medium, and an memory of the self. Colour freely from to from ceramic to paper, from textile to suffusing spaces a unique sensory intensity. It becomes a dwelling to inhabit, a sensory field where perceptions grow, bud, and bloom.
In this spirit, Dana El Masri, perfumer and interdisciplinary artist, has created original fragrances for the exhibition: Nafs (Self, Spirit, Breath) and Joy (2025). They extend the synaesthetic experience and invite visitors to immerse themselves in the artist’s olfactory universe.
The scenography, conceived by Bechir Riahi, shapes an ample, and shifting space: suspended veils, interwoven sounds from Algeria and Germany, and a library gathering the artists books. This journey invites one to feel before understanding, to be carried away by the enchantments of this vast empire of the senses.
Hamid Zénati has left a path of colours, motifs, and lights, a trail of moments suspended in patience and quiet temporality, where matter breathes in rhythm with our own breath. His work is a fertile memory, a contemplative attentiveness, attuned to the murmurs of childhood, exile, and renewal. He teaches us, effortlessly, to look differently, to hear in every motif, in every colour, the persistent hearbeat of life. He helps us to embroider bridges where all seems scattered. He bequeaths to us a sensory and spiritual adventure to be pursued, an art of binding together the fragments of reality with the patience of a guardian of light and the tenacity of a gardener of forms.
It falls to us to carry its momentum forward, to let its lights and colours radiate to the farthest reaches of our imagination, and to nurture the fragile splendour of these liberated spaces where art becomes a refuge and a rediscovery of the self. It is upon us to be its lucid transmitters, its committed witnesses. It is upon us to follow the light of the horizon he traced.
Press release from B7L9 Art Centre
Image: Hamid Zénati. Untitled. Undated. Photography by Maximilian Geuter © Hamid Zénati Estate. Image courtesy of Hamid Zénati Estate
