“And look, mother,
I am
a dark temple with your true spirit rises
beautiful
and tough as chestnut
stanchion against your nightmare of weakness
and of my eyes conceal
a squadron of conflicts and rebellions
I learned from you to define myself
through your denials.”

Audre Lorde, Black Mother Women, 1971

The flesh, in its myriad forms, emerges as a symbol—a raw remnant of our past, a tender fragment of our present, destined to fade with time. It bears witness to our struggles, etching memories into our very being. Our bodies, repositories of experience, shelter a visceral knowledge, a living testament to the events and emotions that have shaped us. Like an echo of the mind, the body replays the past through somatic symptoms—a silent language, conveying the weight of our history, the imprints of our trauma.
Have you seen that figure, draped in the trappings of society’s expectations? Its long coat, woven from the norms and dictates of the world, weighs heavily upon its shoulders. Hidden underneath this facade lies the essence of who we are—the unspoken truths, the silent struggles that shape their existence.
Chamakh’s introspective journey leads her inward, sculpting and shaping her skin to provoke feeling, to evoke alternate realities. Like a keeper of her own consciousness, she screens through the fabric of her being, selecting pieces that resonate with her present persona.

The body keeps the score of these experiences; it ‘knows’ the event in its ‘flesh’ and is a living reminder of the happening and the emotions felt at a particular time. Just as the mind can be triggered to recall past events, so does the body replay the past in the form of somatic symptoms. These symptoms are the stain of a history of emotions and trauma embedded within the tissues, which form a dynamic, unconscious memory system.
We, too, are complex tapestries—interwoven threads in the fabric of cultural and somatic systems. Our stories, entwined with others’, form the rich narrative of humanity.

Yet, beneath the surface lies a silent cartography—a map of our traumas, etched into the very fabric of our being. Each scar, each blemish, speaks volumes, revealing the burdens we carry, the wounds we bear.

In her artistic vision, Sana grants the body agency—the freedom to be molded and remolded, to wear its scars as badges of honor. She endows the body with the ability to un-pack the plethora of baggage it was carrying. And in the end, she proudly dons these fragments of her story, laying bare the layers of her existence for all to see. Here, we are encouraged to cast off the veil of fear and confront the intense depths of our emotions, revealing the concealed stories that reside within us – both those handed down to us and
those yet to be discovered.
Perhaps in seeing, we find bliss, and in breathing, we take a step into the unexplored raw realms. In this act of liberation, we find solace—a release from the burdens that bind us, a step toward reclaiming our true selves.
Amidst the scars, lies a paradoxical beauty—a cathartic release found in the transformation of pain into expression. Through the flesh, our stories find voice—words, screams, echoes of our deepest fears. Each scar, each somatic field, becomes a testament to our resilience, a testament to our ability to transcend.

The studio is an imagined and imaginative space that takes many forms. It can extend from a table in the back of a room to a hangar of several square meters. It doesn’t matter much what shape it takes, but its definition according to each artist is fundamental. Each one defines appropriates, inhabits, and lives it in a singular way.

It is the space of tests, experimentation, contemplation, fragility, and frustration. The studio has hosted numerous artists, it is above all a social space through which you meet artists and lead you to other studios and discoveries. It is indeed a space capable of weaving a social link with the scene, anchored in a neighborhood with a very particular handicraft vocation. This exhibition is an open space that stems from the traces of brushes, which overflow on the canvas, capable of telling how many layers and the mixture of colors that each artist have mixed.

The patterns that are imprinted in the visual memory and reflected in the color in an insitu intervention. This studio space has seen the passage of several people with several mediums.

What if they were to find themselves in a common temporality?

What if they found themselves in a shared, common place, where usually the practice is individual ?

Will they weave in between their expressions, to find themselves in the mirror of the other, or to question the limit of this space?

It embodies the sketches or the premises of a new artistic statement that had an impact on the artistic approach, to the body of work in the journey of an artist.

As a break, a step forward or a step of change; reflected through the layered works.

From sketchs, drawing, painting, installation, video works, and work in progress, L’atelier is the embracing boat to all these plural expressions. It will be in dialogue between artists who have already started their career journey and young ones who have enhanced theirs. This exhibition is an attempt to give space and reflect an emerging scene. It is essentially about the studio, the artistic process and the approaches that come within. It’s an extension of the state of the budding art scene.

“A drawing would-it command not to name it.” This quote reminds me of the first time I experienced Thameur Mejri’s work. It’s like a puzzled feeling of not knowing where to look or where to begin navigating between the de-constructed lines and elements. My gaze started seeking elements I might know or that I could name as the eye generally seeks to settle on the familiar spots, in its background as the human being always seeks comfort.
The skull, the fly and the TV shed a statement by their scales and duplication. A quite complex and polysemic combination which leads me to compose their meaning, to look for plausible connections to the world in which we live, or simply in the artist’s narratives.
These were the first elements and milestones of Mejri’s body of work, the protagonists of his productions who appear in his paintings, drawings or sketches. The skull as an ultimate symbol of vanity which tends to orient the reading like a compass and the inevitable fate of death, along with the fly by its light and absurd presence and the weight of the television which influenced a whole generation allied to the information, to the advent of the mass media and of its power of influence.
The return to the fundamentals such as the pictorial elements used by the artist are at the centre of Over the Edge. The exhibition features the curious connection of a deconstructed reality characterized by shredded bodies and recomposed in a pseudo-anatomical logic that suggests rather a tumultuous being in juxtaposition of the artist’s mundane everyday practices.
Drawing with charcoal was a major artistic gesture for this exhibition. After painting and mixed media, the drawing has found its place in the space of a canvas as an act of rejuvenation and of research at the same time

Along with the pictorial leitmotiv that followed the artist’s journey, the body of work is centred on the genesis of any drawing, which is the point, the line, and the brushstrokes of the flashy colours that serve as a plenum background to black bold graphite hatches.
The assemblage of forms remains as a deconstructed anatomy as Mejri perceives society, the psyche, the political, transposed into the drawing as a metaphor or figurative meaning. As if we pushed the limits of the painting, had peeled its skin to see what remains. We will find a drawing with graphite powder with a hatched treatment where the skull, the fly and the television master elements that have driven the work of Mejri since its genesis are honoured.
The exhibition will deal with what can be kept of the traces of life, what can be maintained of a deconstruction process, resilience and exposure of the ordeals experienced by the artist, materialised by the remains of the characters who carry the pennant of vanity of socio-political postures, of a daily practice or of an introspective relationship to oneself.
One needs time to navigate, contemplate, decompose what Mejri’s work offer as an experience. A layered reading, where each time an element pops out or even a kid’s drawing in between of sharp elements, skulls or knifes. It pushes the limits over the edge of reading and perceiving giving space to time, colours and shapes to fulfill a contemplation on a complex reading journey.

Over the past three months, we have had the pleasure of hosting the early career artist Sophia Bsiri at our Atelier, Artist Residency Program.
Following her studies in Mandarin, Sophia undertook, in 2018, private courses in academic drawing with the artist Ahmed Maaleb. She started experimenting with classical constructions of lines and shadows. She then drove her interest in the expression of the matter she used to draw, in its volumetry and its relation to the space.
Her practice is concerned with matter, materiality, gesture, and form in its primary function translated into a secondary one, that of modular sculpture and installation.
As she started experimenting in the atelier, her research was focused primarily on barbed wire and its origins. Coming from an organic and natural root, that took over the years the symbol of oppression of massive security in the streets.
The sharp prickles are made of dozens of interlocking fibres, which increases the resistance and the difficulty of destroying the stems.
She fragmented the wire into pieces, destructured it, and cancelled its repulsive nature, which served as a barrier but once untied, it takes on a free form. These hundred fragmented pieces once unified, find their natural origin, forming roots that spread out on the wall like a climbing plant.

With an affinity for sharp and bulky materials, she turns nails, the sharp tool intended to hang o to carry a form and that it became itself subject. As if it’s a dot or line on a drawing.
She integrates it into the fabric. By dint of using it, repeating it on a porous canvas she multiplies its weight, giving shape to volumetry that associates itself with the movement that it decides.
She works the nail as a weaver works the thread of a repetitive gesture to integrate the canvas one by one as if she is sewing a fabric to end up with a massive and thorny fabric which in the movement generates a form, each time random and a sound of tickling metal. The nail is denatured from its form. It adopts the function of a thread or a line.
She is also well rooted in the alternative scene giving a way into her practice through materiality and subtle selfgenerated sound that translate through the raw and fine tools. On the other hand, Bsiri tends to reflect on analog photagraphy, the density of colours, lights and shadows through her paintings which combine both charcoal drawing and spray paint.
Bsiri navigates between these classical assets by combining them with her new research, explores the potential of the materiality and omits in defining raw tools for her work.

Special thanks to

Sophia Bsiri              for her trust and the exchange     
Haithem Toumi                  for handling the artworks     
Rania Hentati                  for the communication   
Insaf Mejri                    for the production follow-up
Selma Feriani            for supporting the Atelier         
 

In May 2022, Sonia Kacem took part in the residency program at l’Atelier Selma Feriani Gallery.The idea of abstraction and what it represents in the Arab world interested Kacem even before her residency at L’Atelier Selma Ferani Gallery. Once in Tunis, Kacem’s wanderings in the Bhar Lazreg neighborhood (an artisanal and industrial district where the studio is located) served as a landmark to define her forms, gestures, and colors.
The random scratches and engravings on the concrete walls she encountered often implied a spontaneous gesture rather than a precise and well-measured approach. This motivated her to create paintings and patterns emanating from the various impressions she gathered during her visit to Tunis.
Initially, her intuitive movements guided her thoughts through the enclosed space of the Gallery. Consequently, the idea of a concept that could be present in each room as a leitmotif took hold to act as a guide and a common thread to navigate of the different spaces.
Her watercolor books, a tool ever-present in this residency and in that of Cairo, served as a base for her work to document her stay in Tunis. Influenced by urban life, stories she heard and the emotions she felt when in urban environments (or settings), whether it is the soundscapes, stories, the architecture and its volumes, everything has been translated into colors and forms that reflect the characters they have transmitted to the artist.
Usually, Sonia Kacem responds to spaces insitu by working on large-scale installations with more sculptural environments where the audience navigates between artifacts.
For the Jelliz & Gestes, Kacem studied the gallery’s blueprints as volumes nested within space. She noticed that rooms were generally rectangular, placed one after the other, producing a sense of reaching a dead-end and turning back. The repetitive act of forms, such are gestures in her watercolor books served as a leitmotif also present in traditional Tunisian architecture.
This work was done in close collaboration with different artisans, aligning discussions with feasibility and know-how. This gave form to a multi-layered idea through knowledge transfer that serves as an intrinsic component to the realization of her works.
The patterns are not just ornamental, each having a form and characteristic that serve a purpose in each tile and can convey meaning through their creation and interpretation. The form thus becomes a transmissible and translatable language handled as typography written with different hands.

Working manually with gestures involves a sensitive study of the color, the brushstroke and its direction. An expert master craftsman guided her through the process. The act of enlarging, of passing from the watercolor to an enameling which reacts to heat provided an opening to draw from ancestral know-how, centuries old and present in decorations of traditional houses.
Echoing Chamla’s ceramic panels, Kacem thought of her interactions with urban space as a contemporary composition in a built-in environment of patterns.
The master artisan managed the entire process of constructing the clay tile, from shaping to drying it until it was dry enough to go in the oven. Engineering the shape involves consideration for changes that occur from heat in the kiln.

Kacem emphasizes the importance of gesture transfer, demystifying the form as the tiles are glazed by hand one at a time.
The collaboration was characterized by a fruitful exchange of ideas, movement, character and knowledge brought to the ceramic panels. The artisans she collaborated with had a great deal of knowledge of the artistic process and could bring that expertise in service of the idea.
The titles “Arches, Lunes, croix et points” serve as keys to read the abstract forms on the ceramics helping to communicate the context in which they were perceived and as codes of communication and identification of specific patterns between the artisans and the artist.
There is a sense of intendedness and even poetry in these compositions, as different hands have appropriated, repeated and interpreted them. The architecture of the space has been strongly amplified by color creating an atmosphere by altering the empirical experience of the viewer.
Jelliz & Gestes, is a sequel of an urban experience translating Sonia Kacem’s expressions and impressions into shapes and vibrations. The idea was to create a sense of energy and movement in space, drawing the viewer’s eye and creating a dynamic visual experience.
The use of pattern on pattern creates a complex image that requires both a sense of proximity for a detailed view and a step back for an overall perception. The public is thus confronted with different angles of interpretation and submerged by different scales of patterns and the intonations of colors.

An architect by background, Myriame Dachraoui is a self-taught artist, that I got to know through her seamless navigation of the digital realm and the traditional canvas to craft scenes that delve deep into dreamscapes and the labyrinth of the subconscious mind, all while embracing a palette of bold and vibrant colours.

During her residency, Dachraoui embarked on an exploration of techniques, of colour palette between going back and forth on a drawing construction.

She drew inspiration from her memories, as well as images that had been imparted to her through her dreams. Her journey even led her to dig into a grimoire in search of postcards and elements that had left a remarkable mark on her as a child – postcards her father had brought back from his travels to Russia during his academic journey.

This pursuit ignited a curiosity within her, primarily concerning the construction of miniatures, the intricacies of color palettes, and their spatial arrangement. She unearthed certain elements from this treasure quest, such as a turquoise blue that she expanded into an entire palette within her canvases, creating an illusion of retro-illumination in the middle of an enchanted forest.
Another standout feature is a miniature nestled at the core of her compositions. The verticality in her works is, in part, influenced by Japanese prints, which, like the postcards, predominantly embark on a reading from a vertical perspective, guided by a succession of elements.

Dachraoui leads the character’s gaze in the middle of her canvas to the hidden corners of her compositions. These hidden corners often take the perception into lush, enigmatic spaces, where the character’s view disappears among the intricate interplay of foliage and shadows. We are given a taste of the character’s contemplative or perhaps, introspective moments off the canvas, as they become one with the natural world that surrounds them.
In other instances, the perspective offers a bird’s-eye gaze, creating a sense of elevated view. It invites the viewer to appreciate the vastness of the landscape, the intricate patterns of fields and waters, and the seemingly infinite horizon.

The discerning eye of an architect distinguishes her work, allowing her to construct layers of narrative, from foreground to background. This open studio experience is thought of as a voyage into Dachraoui’s imagination. With each brushstroke and experimentation, she directs us through her gaze towards a dream, an element, or a narrative that unfolds with layers and vibrations of colour, at times dark and distant, and others, vivid and lucid.
It’s a journey through the distinguished territories of the mind, a testament to the artist’s ingenuity and her ability to take us on an odyssey through the realms of dreams and colour.

Salma Kossemtini, Tunis, July 2023