Ce vide, voilà ma réponse (The void, is my answer) presents a set of drawings and an audio-visual installation that center around a primary school in the El Kef region of Tunisia. These ghostly works circle around ideas of time, and of abandoned spaces, pointing to a moment in which a crucial change had taken place; in which the era of promises and possibilities had ended, supplanted by the depopulated world of an immaterial technological future. It is at this moment that we can sense a world after people. The title of the exhibition itself, drawn from a poem by Henri Michaux, alludes to an overwhelming silence and emptiness that is offered in response by modern monuments of ruin.
The central protagonist of the exhibition is the Eddir primary school, built circa 1969 in the El Kef region of Tunisia and eventually abandoned in 2017. Constructed in the heady period of the Bourguiba presidency, it was ill-equipped to survive into the present. The audiovisual installation, 1996: we have already destroyed it, brings into focus a crucial aspect of the exhibition, that of time. Through long, deliberate shots of the school, layered with audio recordings of conversations between the artist and two generations of workers who lived in and maintained it, a sense of time between that of human life and beyond begins to emerge.
Ali Tnani biography
Born in Tunis in 1982, Ali Tnani is a visual artist. He is based in Tunis. He graduated from the Institut Supérieur des Beaux-Arts de Tunis where he obtained his master's degree. Since then he has frequently exhibited and participated in international art residency programs. "Trace, Space, Data" are some of the key words that revolve around Ali Tnani's artistic practice. This practice leads him to exploit various media and formats such as photography, drawing as well as sound installation and documentary film. His works/achievements include the web-based installation Data Trails (2014-2016), and the documentary film Even The Sun Has Rumors (2017). He has participated in several solo and group exhibitions in Tunisia and abroad including Dans L'intervalle Entre Monument Et Document, a solo exhibition at Galérie El Marsa, north in Tunis and Dubai (2017-2018), A new Humanity, Dakar, Senegal (2018), ClimbingThrough The Tide, at KLF B7L9 Art Station (2019), Tunis and the exhibition El Kazma 'l'Heure d'Hiver Tunis' in Belgium (2020) and The upshot of trans-affective solidarity, MOTORENHALLE Centre for Contemporary Art Dresden - Germany (2021).
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