Point de vue, point d’écoute (Clichés 2) is a series of post- cards sent from Tunisia between the 1970s and 1990s, carefully incised, with only the written and stamped side exhibited.

By placing the cards this way, the picturesque photo invisible, the artist transforms this common object, though it’s almost obsolete today, into a surface that is both critical and poetic.

The handwritten texts can evoke something emotion- al, the memory of a place, a holiday, while the cut out con- tours of what is represented but not seen can only be imagined, like a partial vision of reality.

This then becomes a gesture denouncing what the artist calls “the imposture of the tourist”: “The imposture of the tourist interests me greatly, as the partial and absent-minded observation of reality.

That’s why I focused on objects created for tourists, like the post- card (…), through which I try to recreate this imposture with gestures of subtraction, covering-up and indexation.”

 

Farah Khelil

Born in 1980, in Carthage. She lives and works between Tunis and Paris.

Farah Khelil concentrates her aesthetic research on the delicate equilibrium between writing, reading and imagination, transferring the attention onto the viewer’s perspective.

Images and words alternate and hide each other, creating new and authentic representations of the reality, far from the clichés that sometimes define contemporary culture. In 2007 she graduated at the Institut des Beaux-Arts in Tunis and in 2014 specialised with a PhD in Art and Science at the Sorbonne in Paris. Since 2010, she has taught at the Visual Art Panthéon-Sorbonne Paris I.

Among her recent exhibitions are Medi Terraneum at the Es Baluard Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Palma de Mallorca (2015), Un cabinet de curiosités at the Undercurrent Projects in New York (2014), Mapp’ing E-Fest at the Palais Abdellia Tunis, Restitution at the Art Centre in Port-de-Bouc Martigues in France (2014) and the collective Perception de la Ciutat at the Civic Centre Fort Pienc in Barcelona (2006).