Region
El Kef
dates
2022
category
Our events
This contextual work by multidisciplinary artist Wadi Mhiri is the result of a two-month contextual residency in Kef. It breathes new life into a recently restored former prison in Kef’s Kasbah, recreating traces of the passage of prisoners from the Ottoman era to the present day, including the period of French colonisation.
The artist offers an additional reality that allows visitors to experience the horror of prison life, such as darkness, cramped cells and physical confinement, while also exploring the prisoners’ thoughts and imaginations through a constant interplay between oppression and emotion, memory and creation, constraint and freedom. Using various technical and material means and media—photographs, objects, light, sound, archives—the cells become mental as well as physical spaces that bring to life Romain Rolland’s quote, ‘To create is to kill death.’
About Wadi Mhiri
A multidisciplinary artist born and based in Tunis. His works are created for specific sites that transform into a system of interactive relationships. What constitutes the ‘work’ is no longer the material or medium, nor the visual or pictorial representation, but what is perceptible to our senses and our consciousness as a single system.
Project partners
With the support of DROSOS Foundation
