"In his role as museum curator, Halim Karabibene, presents pieces of the monographic archive of "Karabibene" that the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Tunis would be holding."
This solo exhibition is part of a series of events that the artist has organized since 2007 in the name of MNAMC Tunis -the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art- a museum that does not exist, at least not yet.
Now, it is the artist who invites himself to the museum, auto-exhibits, and "auto-curates;" drawing from the collection and archives of the MNAMC. It is a kind of fiction, but with real artworks, skillful and versatile, created during the period of turbulence that Tunisia has endured since late 2010. As a cross-disciplinary artist, Karabibene presents his prolific work that travels between techniques, cities and times: paintings, etchings and prints, photographs, installations, and videos made between Bizerte, Paris and Berlin. Armed with his pressure cooker that is permanently on the verge of an explosion, Karabibene's artworks exemplify his Donquichottesque, an artistic and humorous battle for the existence of the MNAMC.
The pressure cooker, in the shape of the futuristic museum that could have existed in 2069, became the symbol of a boiling-over Tunisia and a support for Karabibene's visual research after the Jasmine Revolution. The alchemist-artist's laboratory-cooker, "Master of the fire and the valve," is always boiling and bubbling, whistling and rocking with the tide of events. He shows paintings and prints/etchings that leave a mark on his return to the "Studio;" a return inward to himself after the earthquake, answering the call of the street and considering the excess of reality. The excess was revisited to be "trans-deformed," bringing the artist back to his "Onirealistic" world and his unrestrained pictorial fictions.
In his role as museum curator, Halim Karabibene, presents pieces of the monographic archive of "Karabibene" that the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Tunis would be holding. traces of life, sketchbooks, exhibition catalogues, press articles... All museographic resources that will make up the coming catalogue -currently empty- are with the purpose to write a story, a history, that is more than fiction.
