There is an organic quality to the art scene in Tunis, where art grows out of the bustling, lively, chaotic energy that shakes the streets of the city and animates the people who try to channel it into the art system. That's not an easy task in a scene that can't rely on any kind of government master plan, but for a few people who have started a campaign to build something solid.
Among those in the cultural channels, the most visible worldwide is without a doubt Selma Feriani, his new gallery in the El Kram factory, near the port of La Goulette, opened in January 2024. The three-story space has worked since its opening with a scale and seriousness that can hold in any European city. “I decided to build this knowing that in North Africa, many galleries have been there before and have been renovated,” Feriani told the Observer. “For the gallery, I wanted it to be purpose-built, with all the necessary conditions to be an exhibition space.”
It took two years and a collaboration with the architect Chacha Atallah, his fingerprints are visible in every decision: the external references are the hand-applied method often used in the south of Tunisia, translated into concrete; the garden is planted with olive trees, palm trees and orange trees.
Reconstructing national cultural narratives
The current show makes that argument with two shows at once. Nadia Ayari's paintings sit in the main hall: large canvases where plants and flowers take on a menacing quality through repetition, appearing as weapons of some kind. In an indirect way, the canvases speak to the current state of the world's wakefulness and anxiety.
Running along the mezzanine is Nidhal Chamekh's “Conflict”, an extension of his project “Et si Carthage…,” a far-reaching historical investigation of the power dynamics on the two sides of the Mediterranean and its archetypes. With this program, it is clear that Feriani's intention is to open a platform for Tunisian artists to start conversations that are heard worldwide but are more focused here in Tunisia.
And how could it be otherwise? Feriani grew up in the blue and white city of Sidi Bou Said, and is the daughter of the gallerist Essia Hamdi, Le Violon Bleu representing the painters of the École de Tunis, the country's modern movement. “I grew up among artists like Ali Balera, Ali Ben Salem and Rafiq El Kamel. In our family, it was normal to be exposed to art or visit artists in their homes.”
He gained international attention after leaving at 21 to study finance in London, then worked in a bank for four years before opening a gallery in Mayfair in 2009.
His return to Tunisia took place after the Revolution, and, like many young Tunisians, he felt he had to participate in the country's cultural revival. He first established his place in a converted monastery in his hometown of Sidi Bou Said. “I understood that having a gallery in London but not having a platform in Tunisia was unthinkable,” he said. “It is important to have a strong connection where I come from, and then from there I try to reconnect with the rest of the world.”
“We don't ignore the market”
Because of his previous financial background, Feriani remains straightforward about business logic. “We don't ignore the markets,” he said, “because what we do here is fully funded by what we sell.” The gallery is a regular at Frieze, 1-54, Art Basel Paris, Abu Dhabi Art and Art Basel Miami Beach.
The Middle East was the first international market he looked at. “When I started, the first international market was the UAE. The exhibitions in Dubai and Abu Dhabi became important parts of our growth.” Asia followed as a long game. “If you go from North Africa and go east to Hong Kong to tell them your story, it takes time. You don't go there to make quick money. You go there to build relationships.” The United States is his next step, something he will undoubtedly achieve with his willful character.
Looking at other markets is not just a cultural goal but a necessity, as the base of local collectors in Tunisia is small, as he readily admits. However, its character is changing. A younger generation of collectors, many of whom come from financial backgrounds like Feriani's own, approach collecting with a different logic. They track emerging artists early and understand the mechanics of the market. “They like to do what their parents did: buy this artist and see how things change over time.”
The gallery residency program at Selma Feriani's L'Atelier exists in part to serve this relationship. The current artist is the Finnish-Tunisian painter Dora Dalila Cheffi, whose vivid canvases reminiscent of the Fauves and Munch analyze the experience of being what Tunisians call nus-nus—half, between cultures. “In this new series of paintings, I'm looking for archetypes,” the artist tells the Observer. “I drew the figures I saw in Bardo's museum, but I made them my own.”
La Boîte and 32Bis
The idea of reaching new audiences instead of catering to existing ones is something that Fatma Kilani has pursued since 2007 with La Boîte Center d'Art et d'Architecture. The center started in a 25 square meter area on the second floor of an industrially designed building in La Charguia, which was originally a meeting room. “At that time, there were no art institutions,” Kilani recounted. “There were only commercial galleries. Media like video, installation, and performance were not seen at all in Tunisia.” The opening exhibition was done in the Fluxus way: employees of the participating company climbed the stairs, carrying the ceramics they had molded, arranged them on the shelves and received a “free creator certificate” from the artist. “The DNA of La Boîte is the company: this individual ability to produce art.”
What grew out of that first performance now includes a main exhibition space, a ground floor, a dedicated video and film festival in Gabès and satellite programs in chapels and universities. La Boîte's current exhibition, “My House Is a Le Corbusier (Villa Baizeau)” by Italian artist Cristian Chironi, taps into the institution's long-standing fascination with the modernist heritage of Tunisian architecture.
Another building important to the development of the modern art scene in Tunisia is located in the city center, in the former Philips building from 1953. The art space 32Bis serves as the city's most specific experimental center, committed to reflection, living and the kind of thinking that precedes anything.
“Centre-ville was the center of all cultural events until the 2000s, when the shows moved north to the suburbs. After the revolution, there was a comeback, and now there's a real revolution happening.” Hela Djobbi, curator and director of 32Bis, explains. This space is part of that transformation, privately funded by its founder and a circle of donors who have chosen not to receive outside funding. “It gives us a lot of freedom.”
Djobbi describes a place that creates its programs naturally, by association, by the questions raised by one exhibition that opens to the next, by a certain quality of attention that comes from being concentrated in an active space. The current resident, Liên Hoàng-Xuân, is an artist of Vietnamese and Tunisian origin whose practice creates a hybrid city that he calls “South of Nowhere”: a combination of Tunis, Saigon and Beirut-where he lived for a few years-interpreted through painting, printmaking and video, shot with elegiac themes of elegiac woodcut and gold technique.
What Djobbi describes as the center's main purpose should be the focus: to give artists the freedom that the gallery format, by its very nature, makes difficult. “Existing galleries work in a certain format, and artists end up producing in that sales mentality. A space like 32Bis gives more freedom at the level of production, exhibition, creation.”
Yosr Ben Ammar and the district of Phosphor
Elsewhere in the same coastal corridor, the Phosphor Creative District in Bhar Lazreg represents the ideal of self-organization. It began, in the words of Yosr Ben Ammar, whose gallery supports it, “in a very lively way.
The name came from the streets themselves: the Rue du Phosphate running alongside the Rue de l'Or. The district now has about 20 places including galleries, design studios, architectural practices and Nine, Tunisia's first lifestyle hotel, born to accommodate digital nomads passing through Tunis.
The Yosr Ben Ammar Gallery is, in its path, a compressed history of how the modern Tunisian landscape has been shaped by people. It was first opened in 2006 with the idea of creativity Ben Ammar describes as clearly driven by the ecosystem: “My goal was to work with well-known artists who will act as trains for young, lesser-known artists. Well-known artists pull others up.”
At a time when Tunisia did not have a public museum of modern art, the gallery performed an educational and institutional function at the same time: “It was the function of a museum, of an exhibition commissioner and a gallery artist at the same time.”
He also looked, with obvious frustration, at the structural gap that separates Tunis from markets like Dubai or Casablanca: the expatriate community in Tunisia exists but has not yet bought. “In Dubai, France, Morocco, there are large communities of foreign collectors who have installed and invested,” he noted. “In Tunis, foreigners who come here to work, usually pass the time. They are not collectors. But that must change; we need more investors in culture.”
The challenges Ben Ammar names—from visa difficulties that prevent Tunisian artists from attending openings abroad, to the absence of a Tunisian art journal, and an economy that tests everyone's resilience—are contrived and unglamorous. But they refuse to resign. “There is a real effect here. We have to keep pushing, because this phenomenon exists, it is alive, and it deserves to be seen.”
Both Ben Ammar and Feriani believe that building a platform only works as a collective project. “We all know it's very fragile,” concluded Feriani. “We work in a difficult place, we develop artists in a place where things are not easy and inaccessible, and everything is supported privately. But we understand that we can only exist, all of us, if we are strong together.
Some Guides to Creative Travel
