TUNIS — It was early spring in Tunisia, and shockingly brilliant bougainvillea have been exploding, the sky was a brilliant cerulean blue, and the Mediterranean a span of infinite turquoise. That riot of vibrant coloration outdoors 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 many years 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 transferring to Germany as a younger man, he labored primarily as a translator. He made artwork between various jobs, compulsively marking any floor accessible with vivid geometric and natural shapes in his self-described “all-over” fashion.
This exhibition demonstrates that vary of artistic output, together with textiles, discovered objects, wearables, and ceramics. Zénati primarily employed a course of just like monoprinting or stamping, utilizing reduce and painted stencils constituted of paper, cardboard, foil, and different supplies to print and repeat kinds in various 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 article itself, in the direction of an infinite repetition.
Hamid Zénati, Untitled work (undated), hand-painting and printing on cloth
The exhibition title, The Birds Are Chirping Above The Tree, references a household anecdote in regards to the first phrase a younger Zénati realized when he was covertly finding out Arabic, which was outlawed throughout French Colonial rule. He would additionally turn out 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 atmosphere 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; generally tightly orchestrated, and generally wildly chaotic.
Good curatorial choices 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 also be a intelligent nod to the best way that Zénati usually introduced his work. Missing entry to conventional venues, he usually created impromptu cellular exhibitions, packing work right into a suitcase for public show, and generally performing with these packed textiles.
Hamid Zénati, Untitled work (undated), hand-painting and printing on cloth
An adjoining gallery presents a biographic view of Zénati via a group of private images, rugs, and books that time to his wide-ranging, eclectic influences. A variety from his report assortment performs within the nook, and the olfactory artist Dana El-Masri was commissioned to make two scents for the exhibition, introduced in lidded ceramic bowls. One, referred to as “Nafs (Self, Spirit, Breath)” (2025), is supposed to evoke the artist himself via a mixture of amber, tobacco, and Somali Frankincense. This space of the exhibition felt very intimate, virtually like a studio go to; the private gadgets create a way of the artist as an entire individual, and signify a extra ingenious approach of exhibiting biography than simply wall textual content or timelines.
To light up the change of concepts and influences which have been transferring via the area in his lifetime, the curators additionally chosen works representing contemporaries of Zénati, together with Souhila Bel Bahar’s free and summary botanical compositions; Nja Mahdaoui’s superbly structured graphic calligraphy; and a choice 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 essential addition to the report 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) via July 20. The exhibition was curated by Nadine Nour el Din with Anna Schneider.
