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Tunisian artist Safia Farhat was not only a dynamic tapestry creator, but had an impressive resumé including ceramicist, educator, women’s rights activist, and publishing pioneer. She was a woman who accumulated a list of historic firsts in her lifetime.
She contributed to the growth of visual culture in independent Tunisia under the progressive leadership of President Habib Bourguiba. Farhat designed national stamps, had her fiber art displayed in the country’s banks, hotels, and schools, and worked with expert weavers and artisans in her studio.
Farhat was born in the harbor city of Rades in 1924 and raised in a well-to-do family. It was her maternal aunt, who was skilled in knitting and crochet, who cultivated Farhat’s love of art. She went on to study at the Tunis Institute of Fine Arts and was reportedly just the third Tunisian woman to enroll there.
She later became the institute’s first female director in 1966 — remaining in the role for more than a decade. She encouraged female students to take part in the institute’s programming. Farhat also founded Tunisia’s first magazine for women, “Faiza,” delving into feminism and decolonization, among other social issues.
Her colorful, thickly lined tapestries depict animals, plants, and men and women wearing traditional clothing. “When I saw her work, I was really fascinated by its sculptural elements, the color, the various techniques that were embedded in it — and by their stories,” Jessica Gerschultz, a professor of African studies at the University of Kansas, told Arab News.
“She seems to really play on self-referentiality,” she continued. “Her works are referring to her other works, so there are many symbols — lots of triangles and zigzags — integrated into her weavings and other works that she did in ceramics and iron.”
Farhat, who died in 2004, is a name still recognized by some older people in her homeland, but she has been generally overlooked, ironically, by young art students in Tunisia. “At the institute, maybe students know her name, but they’re not very familiar with her,” noted Gerschultz. “Maybe they don’t know her at all.”
International interest in Farhat, however, was boosted last year as a result of her works being showcased at the Venice Biennale. “It’s wonderful to see her contributions now being viewed more widely,” said Gerschultz.
Project shines a light on the cultural exchange between Algeria, France and Italy during the 1960s.
Zineb Sedira has outlined plans for her presentation at the French pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale (23 April-27 November), revealing that the project will focus on Algerian cinema of the 1960s and 1970s and its links to the Italian and French film industries. The subject matter is timely as 2022 is the 60th anniversary of Algeria achieving independence from France. On 5 July 1962, Algeria became a sovereign state after an eight-year war which resulted in the deaths of at least 400,000 Algerians.
Sedira is the first artist of Algerian descent to be selected as the country’s representative. Sedira, who was born in Paris to Algerian parents, attended college in London, completing her undergraduate studies at Central Saint Martins school of art. She is now based in South London.
Sedira revealed her ideas for the cinematographic installation Dreams have no titles in an online press briefing held 18 February, outlining how she initially researched the history of Algerian film for an exhibition at the Jeu de Paume in Paris in 2019. Her passion for cinema was sparked by childhood trips to the local cinema in the 1960s in her home town of Gennevilliers outside Paris (these film outings were made with her father every Thursday when school was closed).
This interest developed further during her time as a student in London. “As part of postcolonial studies, I came across [the philosopher] Frantz Fanon and [the 1966 film] The Battle of Algiers. In France, I never came across those people because The Battle of Algiers was still censored in France [in the late 1970s and early 1980s],” she said. “There were no intellectual role models to me of Algerian origin; in England, I discovered there was a wealth of [Algerian] men, women and filmmakers.”
For the pavilion piece, Sedira carried out research at the Cinémathèque in Algiers, discovering that many films financed by the state of Algeria at the time were also co-produced with Italian and French filmmakers. “So when I was asked to propose an idea for the French pavilion, I thought of the Mostra [Venice Film Festival]. I thought it was interesting to do something around the three countries,” she said. Sedira wants to focus on the cooperation between France, Italy and Algeria— and the solidarity between the trio of nations—though her Venice “project goes beyond that”, the artist stresses.
Sedira visited numerous film archives in Algeria, France and Italy as part of the research process. “In Italy, [we visited] Venice, Turin and Bologna. We discovered a film that had disappeared,” says Yasmina Reggad, the co-curator of the French pavilion, referring to Les Mains Libres made by the Italian director Ennio Lorenzini in 1964.
“It was the first international film collaboration between Algeria and another country [Italy],” said Sedira, but after 1966 Les Mains Libres was lost. She eventually found the forgotten work in a small archive in Rome. “It is an important film for anyone interested in post-1962 Algerian history,” she adds.
The French pavilion project aims to be a starting point for discussions on other topics such as colonialism, collective and individual histories, national identity and the fight against racism. “The notion of a nation begs to be critiqued and challenged. What is a nation at the end of the day? It is a big fiction to believe that when you draw a certain line, everyone who happens to be behind this line is of the same mentality and culture,” said Sam Bardaouil, the co-director of the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin along with Till Fellrath (the duo have also co-curated the French pavilion).
“In a sense, a pavilion is an attempt to give a physical form to a fiction, so to use fiction in the language of cinema as a way to critique nation and belonging is such an intelligent and timely way to discuss these issues,” Bardaouil said.
The three pavilion curators will participate in a film to be shown in the pavilion. “We’ll be turned into actors and actresses,” said Reggad. Bringing together an artistic community was paramount, added Sedira, who relished the opportunity “to work with friends, to be surrounded by friends”. The film production will also include members of the crew and her son. “I was playing on the aesthetic and structure in cinema in the 1960s in low-budget films when one would play many roles,” she said
The pavilion project will also include a “conversation” with the UK pavilion artist, Sonia Boyce, and the Swiss representative, Latifa Echakhch. “Sonia was my neighbour for many years and she taught me at one point when I was studying art in London,” said Sedira.
At the briefing, the curators also discussed the three accompanying journals linked to the pavilion project. Each issue refers to a city—Algiers, Venice, and Paris—that has played an integral part in Sedira’s practice. “The journal is an extension of what the project entails inside the pavilion. The cities mark the phases of Zineb’s life, they become entry points to questions that are related to the themes that will be discovered in the film and installation in the pavilion,” said Bardaouil. Contributors include the French artist Laure Prouvost and the actor Nabil Djedouani.“The journal has allowed for a diversity and plurality of voices,” Bardaouil added.
The journal design is based on film magazines of the 1960s and 1970s, added Reggad, and also borrows from militant leaflets of the era. The journals are “doors to an intellectual horizon [with] texts, images and playlists”, said Eva Nguyen Binh, the president of L’Institut Français which is supporting the pavilion. Other sponsors include Arts Council England and the dealer Kamel Mennour who represents Sedira
In her latest exhibiton, “My Silk Road,” the Algerian visual artist Salima Ayadi presents a tribute to her cultural heritage with 19 paintings and 30 scarves inspired by — among other things — Islamic architecture, ceramic and faience patterns, and calligraphy.
The exhibition opened at the National Museum of Antiquities and Islamic Art in Algiers on January 22 and runs until February 13.
Ayadi graduated from the School of Fine Arts of Algiers with a degree in visual communication in 1982. For more than 37 years, she has produced silk-painted works — a technique to which she was introduced by an artist friend while on a trip to Switzerland. She has created artworks and scarves for national institutions such as the Senate and the People’s National Assembly, or for large companies including Sonatrach, Sonelgaz, Air Algeria, to name a few.
“For national institutions, I have worked on the cultural and historical heritage of Algeria, which is particularly rich. My works represent landscapes and monuments of all regions of the Casbah of Algiers, the Tassili n’Ajjer in the South-East, or the Berber patterns of Kabylia,” Ayadi tells Arab News. “These creations have been exhibited and some of them have been offered to foreign partners.” Her work has been shown in numerous group and individual exhibitions both at home and in Libya, Morocco and Iran.
Her first solo exhibition, held in 2017 at the Palace of Culture Moufdi Zakaria in Kouba, was a great success. “This exhibition (was very important), because it allowed me interact and mingle with the public,” she says. Each painting is created over a series of stages, each with its own potential pitfalls. Ayadi says that her selection of colors — reds, blues and greens are particular favorites — is based on the idea behind each painting. Once the selection process is complete, she can get to work — an often-painstaking process.
Behind each piece lies her passionate love of her Algerian heritage and her country’s rich and diverse culture. Currently, besides the “My Silk Road” exhibition, she is focused on producing a book of her work, which she hopes to release in the next year or so.
source/content: arabnews.com
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Salima Ayadi is an Algerian visual artist. (Supplied)
