TUNIS — It was early spring in Tunisia, and shockingly brilliant bougainvillea had been exploding, the sky was a brilliant cerulean blue, and the Mediterranean a span of infinite turquoise. That riot of vibrant coloration exterior 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, underneath French occupation. After transferring to Germany as a younger man, he labored primarily as a translator. He made artwork between different jobs, compulsively marking any floor accessible with vivid geometric and natural shapes in his self-described “all-over” type.
This exhibition demonstrates that vary of artistic output, together with textiles, discovered objects, wearables, and ceramics. Zénati primarily employed a course of much like monoprinting or stamping, utilizing reduce and painted stencils made out of paper, cardboard, foil, and different supplies to print and repeat types in different 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 item itself, in direction of an infinite repetition.
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 learning Arabic, which was outlawed throughout French Colonial rule. He would additionally turn into fluent in Darija, French, Arabic, English, and German. To me, Zénati’s visible cacophony alludes to collisions of language: the tongues through which one thinks and speaks and people of 1’s setting 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; typically tightly orchestrated, and typically wildly chaotic.
Good curatorial selections by Nadine Nour el Din with the help of Anna Schneider amplify Zénati’s manic art-all-over aesthetic — the house is splendidly crowded, layered, and full of labor in every single place you flip: on partitions, atop pedestals, and hanging in house. The exhibition design can be a intelligent nod to the way in which that Zénati usually introduced his work. Missing entry to conventional venues, he usually created impromptu cell exhibitions, packing work right into a suitcase for public show, and typically performing with these packed textiles.
An adjoining gallery presents a biographic view of Zénati via a group of private pictures, rugs, and books that time to his wide-ranging, eclectic influences. A range from his file 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, known 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, nearly like a studio go to; the non-public 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 had been transferring via the area in his lifetime, the curators additionally chosen works representing contemporaries of Zénati, together with Souhila Bel Bahar’s unfastened and summary botanical compositions; Nja Mahdaoui’s fantastically 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 faculties of thought. Certainly, this exhibition isn’t only a reassertion of a singular artist, however an necessary addition to the file of an lively, interconnected, modernist motion in North Africa.
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.
