"Narration is a crucial element of my work as it allows me to shift the discourse towards the everyday rather than the canonical. It's something that we, as artists, can achieve, and it's part of our role."  - Rafram Chaddad -

The Kamel Lazaar Foundation invites you to a new exhibition titled "The Seven Good Years" by artist Rafram Chaddad. Crafted as an exceptional visual and sensory experience, the exhibition delves into the artist's rich family heritage, offering profound reflections on the interplay between past and present, memory and identity. 

Rafram Chaddad's visual and material artistic exploration draws inspiration from his family's aesthetic journey. He employs the video camera as a tool to retrace his family members' voyages, utilizing footage of 'louages' (public transport van) between Tunis and the island of Djerba to establish connections across different eras. Navigating meticulously composed environments of objects, sounds, and lights, visitors to 'The Seven Good Years' are prompted to engage with the artist's world through layers of culinary memories, sights, and aromas that evoke the concept of memory ('fqida'). 

The exhibition tackles essential questions: How have talismanic objects such as icons, amulets, and clothing shaped and continued to shape various places and identities? The works on display, akin to fragments of a fragmented memory, delve deeply into these notions. 

"The Seven Good Years" embodies the artist's return to his roots and origins. Like sand gently filling a small wooden fishing boat, the motif of "Seven   Years" takes on profound significance, fostering cultural exchange and stimulating contemplation about the enduring influence of embodied traditions. 

The exhibition, "The Seven Good Years," offers a captivating journey through time and space, merging past and present in a mesmerizing visual and sensory symphony. 

Born in Djerba in 1976, an island off the southern coast of Tunisia, Rafram Chaddad is an artist whose photographs, films, and multimedia installations explore archives, migration narratives, and the sense of belonging. His work defamiliarizes the familiar and familiarizes the strange. Operating between Tunis and New York, Chaddad's work reflects personal experiences while commenting on broader socio-political issues such as migration, displacement, identity, and belonging. 

Over the past two decades, he has created numerous short films and installations exhibited worldwide in cultural institutions, galleries, and museums, including Kunst im Tunnel in Düsseldorf, Kunstraum in New York, and Kayu Lucie Fontaine Gallery in Bali. Chaddad has held solo exhibitions at the Mucem Museum in Marseille and the Maximilian Forum in Munich. Since 2021, Chaddad has served as a visiting critic in Columbia University's Master of Fine Arts program.