MARSEILLE.- The contemporary art scene in Tunisia is rich, varied and fertile. With Traces… Fragments of a Contemporary Tunisia, a project consisting of two consecutive exhibitions – Fragments I (from 13 May to 28 September 2015) and Fragments II (from 4 November 2015 to 29 February 2016) – the MuCEM offers a glimpse of the images of Tunisia’s young artists.

This diptych of exhibitions is based on a search for traces of what remains from the past. It bears witness to a pursuit of history, to ravaged landscapes, and a refusal to simply wipe the slate clean. The works presented draw upon what comes from and what predates, well before, the political event.

However, it would be simplistic to speak of an “art of the revolution”, a label that resembles a slogan or passing fad. It is not just a question of addressing the short lived, transitory episodes, which saturate the news distorting perceptions, but to expand the horizon by multiplying the perspectives.

Traces… Fragments of a Contemporary Tunisia gathers in two exhibitions the work of artists Zied Ben Romdhane, Ismaïl Bahri, Fakhri El Ghezal, Héla Ammar, Souad Mani, ismaël, Augustin Le Gall, Wadi Mhiri and Houda Ghorbel, Faten Gaddes and Wassim Ghozlani, as well as photographs by one of the first Tunisian photographers, Abdelhak El Ouertani. Composed of photography, video, installations and digital art this exhibition intends to testify, five years after the revolution, to the richness and multiplicity of perspectives on Tunisia today.

The exhibition privileges the viewpoint of the image: seeing in the latter what it reveals about a new Tunisia turned toward the past, the present and the future.

Each fragment of the exhibition opens with the work of one of the first Tunisian photographers, ABDELHAK EL OUERTANI, whose prints and glass plates were preserved by Beit el Bennani. A young man from a good family, trained in 1892 by the Lumière brothers in Lyon, Abdelhak El Ouertani conducted a photographic campaign in Tunisia in 1894, before suddenly disappearing in 1896. This exhibition finally gives a name and a face to an artist who, until now, had only been recognised by the phrase, “indigenous photographer”, according to colonial discourse. Along with photographer and filmmaker SamamaChikli, whose work is well known, El Ouertani is among those who left traces. Their images reveal what could have, quite simply, disappeared. They give a face to time as well, a grain, not to a voice, but to a period. They are a sign from faraway, of a past that is still not abolished. The presence of an absence.

It is from this “finitude”, from this fragility even, of the trace in the artists’ perspectives that this exhibition is born, far from the turmoil of political events. It is based on a contemporary approach, which should not be confused with topicality, but rather which attempts to establish the untimely in the actual.

FRAGMENTS II extends this questioning through the image of a contemporary Tunisia, whose mystery is inexhaustible.

FATEN GADDES confronts the industrial history of Tunisia, by collecting traces of what no longer exists, the immense STEG power station (Société Tunisienne d’Électricité et de Gaz) whose building, located in La Goulette, was razed. A history erased, of which Faten Gaddes forcefully reminds us. Entrails of scrap metal, amassed cogs and machines reminiscent of Chaplin’s Modern Times, in their inexorable and poetic movement. These images are both frontal and vertical, in the industrial brutality that they reveal and in the architectural vistas that they suggest. They hint at a bygone world, whose deafening noise and fossil energy we can still hear.

These traces of the industrial revolution echo other kinds of traces, those of another revolution: the Tunisian political revolution of January 2011. WASSIM GHOZLANI captures these decisive moments and this appropriation of the public space by the younger generations that toppled the established order. Speaking through actions, demands posted in the streets or on tents, which attest to the occupation of government buildings. There is in these images a clamour that is still perceived today. This disruption, of which Tunisia has written act I, is a true dawning. The photographs of Wassim Ghozlani hold high both the fury and the joy.

WADI MHIRI and HODA GHORBEL entice visitors to other depths, among the strata of family memories that are counted off, which appear then disappear with the simple gesture of a hand. Age-old motions of caressing, palpating and sorting seeds. The hand uncovers the memories buried in old family photographs that little by little resurface and then disappear again. Seeds of time that escape, rolling up and down through a horizontal hourglass invented by the artists with an intimate awareness of the trace, of their genealogical traces buried in a rural Tunisia of yesterday, that the urban Tunisia of today tends to forget.

AUGUSTIN LE GALL, Marseillais photographer established in Tunisia for five years, also revives a distant memory, one of the last arifa, Riadh Ezzawech, initiate of the Stambali cult, a possession cult of Afro-Maghrebian origin. Through a secrete complicity between the photographer and this man who speaks to the jinn, the imaginal world of the in-between appears before our eyes. The presence of mystery in the image, which affects the eyes, could be a hierophantic form. This is where the image touches the sacred, where the elusive becomes visible by waiting, listening and by the initiation that could lead to the photographer’s possession…

This series is rare not only in marking an initiation practice that is gradually fading, but also in the mystery that it renders perceptible. The variations and contrasts of the black and white of the photographic material combine with the costumes and gestures of Riadh Ezzawech who becomes, beyond himself, another character, a arifa, an inspiration who communicates with the beyond. Augustin Le Gall, in combining his anthropological expertise with photographic art, knows how to draw us into this mysterious world.

These traces of the sacred are aesthetically opposite to those that ISMAËL invites us to discover in his Scènes de la vie quotidienne (Scenes from Everyday life). Such a discrepancy testifies to the contrary currents setting the rhythm of this exhibition, in distinct and never homogenous fragments. The photographic material, like the film installation proposed by ismaël, is full of faults and pixels that come from digital capture devices by webcam. This is not an intrusion to which we invite the artist, even though our greedy eye can sometimes be a voyeur. It provides access to the interior of a closed world that digital technology is opening to somewhere else, an outside that becomes an intimate inside, banal and surprising at the same time. These everyday actions, which usually vanish, find here a vivid memory. They exist in the very lifeblood of their shared desire, in the exchange sometimes abstract that constitutes a screen and which at the same time traverses appearances. An open work, in becoming, that leaves plenty of room for the unfinished, and which remains a requirement and a rare quest of the contemporary.