“I am like one who wore his brick to show the world how was his home.”
Bertolt Brecht
Often I was asked this question: how do I see myself as an artist? My answer has always been the same: I consider myself an immigrant worker. My job is to consider what it is to be an artist, when he feels different from in his own cultural context, even in his own role.
With this necessity, this permanent need to think of exile, the project of the Exile Pavilion was born, as a traveling project, offering a parallel cartography, a free geography of temporary exhibitions, with stops in different countries.
The project raises the question of the exile as a new space to be reinvented, to be rethought and finally to be invested. He wants to question both the global and specific links between various forms of displacement, whether the migrant worker’s situation, the expatriate, the refugee or the exile of war, natural disasters, economical problems, and political or racial persecutions.The Exile Pavilion wants to invest and cross all boundaries, revisiting the experiences of the exile and reactivate the traces in history. Where does the exile begin and where does it end?
Are we all equal against the displacement and exile? And from who are we exiles?The Exile Pavilion does not exist as an architectural building even if the proposal is made for architects to imagine. But it is the works of artists, visual artists, musicians, poets, writers, performers they are exiles or their work deals with the displacement, which build together this protean and nomadic pavilion. Its journey will make layovers at artistic structures, institutions, ephemeral places, in the form of exhibitions, publications and meetings. At each stop, the works and archival materials are redesigned according to the place and its history.
mounir fatmi,
June 30, 2016
Studio Fatmi
mounir fatmi
http://www.mounirfatmi.com/
fatmi.mounir@studiofatmi.com
Assistante de projet
Laura Pandolfo
laura@studiofatmi.com
Website design
Untitled Agency
Courtesy: the artist and Officine dell’Immagine, Milan.
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.”
Born in 1980, in Carthage, Farah Khelil 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).
Courtesy: the artist and Officine dell’Immagine, Milan.