"In the cabinet of buried memories, this imagination redistributes the cards, proceeds to unpublished collections, disturbs the historicity of memories, to the benefit of a "re-creation" essentially subjective."
Elmarsa Gallery is pleased to present Mémoire en raccourcis (Memory in short), the gallery's first solo exhibition with Tunisian artist Aicha Filali, featuring a new body of work.
The personal and family history of the artist is an integral part of this new body of work. She is familiar with the great History, and the autobiographical gems that pepper this work, and attest as much to an assumed sincerity as to an undeniable identity quest. Aicha Filali's work is inscribed in the hollow of an aesthetic and plastic quest: she ruled out the reading of the past, transcribed by history books and official stories, to offer us a novel insight, a new scale of values.
Plunging back into the first two decades of the Bourguiba era.
The artist revisits them through two types of supports: altarpieces decorated with color image, and fabrics onto which printed photos show a crowd, all dressed in grey, with masked features with embroidered thread. Grey and white flood, where stands out the naked face of the leader Habib Bourguiba, coiffed with a blood-red "chéchia".
In the cabinet of buried memories, this imagination redistributes the cards, proceeds to unpublished collections, disturbs the historicity of memories, to the benefit of a "re-creation" essentially subjective.
This body of work resets childhood snippets in the present time, still alive for those who have lived them.