There is an organic quality to the art scene in Tunis, where art grows out of the bustling, vibrant, chaotic energy that stirs the streets of the city and animates the individuals who try to channel it into an art system. This is no easy feat for a scene that cannot rely on any kind of government master plan, but only on a handful of people who have embarked on a mission to build something sustainable.
Among those in the cultural trenches, the most visible at the international level is without a doubt Selma Ferianiwhose new gallery in El Kram industrial, near the port of La Goulette, opened in January 2024. The three-story space has operated since its opening with a scale and seriousness that holds its own in any European city. “I decided to build this knowing that in North Africa, most gallery spaces have been pre-existing and renovated,” Feriani tells the Observer. “For the gallery I wanted it purpose-built, with all the conditions required to be an exhibition space.”
It took two years and an architect partnership Chacha Atallahwhose fingerprints are visible in every decision: the exterior refers to a hand-applied technique traditionally used in southern Tunisia, made in concrete; the garden is planted with olive, palm and orange trees.
Reconstructing a country’s cultural narrative
The current program makes that argument with two simultaneous shows. Nadia AyariHis paintings occupy the main hall: large paintings in which plants and flowers take on a menacing quality through repetition, appearing as weapons of sorts. Indirectly, the canvases speak of the state of readiness and anxiety of the contemporary world.
Running together on the mezzanine floor is Nidhal ChamekhFrictions, an extension of his project Et si Carthage…, a broad historical investigation of power dynamics on both sides of the Mediterranean and its archetypes. Through the show, it’s clear that Ferian’s goal is to set the stage for Tunisian artists to start a set of conversations that resonate internationally, but are deeply anchored here in Tunisia.
And how could it be otherwise? Ferian grew up in the blue-and-white cobbled town of Sidi Bou Said, and she is the daughter of a gallerist. Essia Hamdiwhose Blue violin represented the painters of the Ecole de Tunis, the country’s leading modernist movement. “I grew up around artists like But Balera, Ali Ben Salem AND Rafiq El Kamel. For our family, it was normal to be exposed to art or visit artists in their homes.”
She developed an international outlook after leaving at 21 to study finance in London, then worked in a bank for four years before opening the gallery in Mayfair in 2009. “The motivation was the fact that none of the artists I liked who came from the region were sufficiently represented in London.”
Her return to Tunisia came after the Revolution and, like many young Tunisians, she felt she had to participate in the country’s cultural renaissance. She first created her space in a converted monastery in her hometown of Sidi Bou Said. “I realized that having the gallery in London, but not having a platform in Tunisia, was something missing from the puzzle,” she says. “It’s important to have a strong connection with the country I come from and from there try to reconnect with the rest of the world.”
“We don’t ignore the market”
Due to her previous financial background, Feriani remains very straightforward in business logic. “We don’t ignore the market,” she says, “because what we do here is completely 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 she looked at. “When I started, the first international market was the United Arab Emirates. Fairs in Dubai and Abu Dhabi became an essential part of our growth.” Asia followed as a longer game. “When you come from North Africa and you go all the way east to Hong Kong to tell them your story, it takes time. You’re not going there to make money very quickly. You’re going there to build a relationship.” The United States is her next move, something she will no doubt approach with her trademark determination.
Seeking out other markets is not just a cultural mission, but a necessity, as the local collector base in Tunisia is, as she readily admits, small. However, her character is changing. The new generation of collectors, many of them from financial backgrounds similar to Ferian’s, approach collecting with a different logic. They scout 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 evolve over time.”
The gallery residency program at L’Atelier by Selma Feriani exists in part to serve this relationship. The current artist in residence is the Finnish-Tunisian painter Dora Dalila Chiefwhose vivid paintings reminiscent of the Fauves and Munch analyze the experience of being what Tunisians call nus-nus – half-half, between cultures. “For this new series of paintings, I’m really looking at archetypes,” the artist tells the Observer. “I drew figures I saw in the Bardo museum, but then I made my own.”
La Boîte and 32Bis
The logic of reaching new audiences instead of serving existing ones is something Fatma Kilani has attended since 2007 with La Boîte Center d’Art et d’Architecture. The center started in 25 square meters on the second floor of an industrial area building in La Charguia, originally a meeting room. “At that time there were no art centers”, says Kilani. “There were only commercial galleries. Media like video, installation and performance were absolutely not visible in Tunisia.” The inaugural exhibition was a Fluxus-style performance: employees of the host company climbed the stairs, carrying clay objects they had shaped, arranged them on shelves, and received a “certificate of free creator” from the artist. “The DNA of La Boîte is the company: this ability for every person to produce art.”
What came out of that first performance now includes a main exhibition space, a studio floor, a video and film festival dedicated to Gabes, and satellite programs at churches and universities. La Boîte’s current exhibition, “My house is a Le Corbusier (Villa Baizeau)” by the Italian artist Cristian Chironifits the center’s longer fascination with Tunisia’s modernist architectural heritage.
Another key building in the development of the contemporary art scene in Tunisia is located in the city center, in a former Philips building dating from 1953. The 32Bis art space functions as the city’s most clearly experimental institution, dedicated to process, residence and the kind of thinking that precedes each object.
“Centerville was really the center of all cultural activity until the 2000s, when the galleries moved north to the suburbs. After the revolution, there was a return, and now there’s a real transition happening.” The whole jobthe curator and director of 32Bis, explains. The space is part of that transition, privately funded by its founder and a circle of clients who have chosen not to take outside funding. “It gives us a lot of freedom.”
Djobbi describes a space that generates its programming organically, through meetings, through questions raised by one exhibition that opens to another, through the special quality of attention that comes from being involved in a working neighborhood. current resident, Lien Hoang-Xuanis an artist of Vietnamese and Tunisian descent whose practice constructs an imaginary composite city she calls the “South of Nowhere”: a mix of Tunisia, Saigon and Beirut – where she lived for several years – presented in painting, prints and video, shot with elegiac themes and gold-leaf woodcut techniques.
What Djobbi describes as the center’s main mission is worth dwelling on: to give artists a freedom that the gallery format, by its very nature, makes difficult. “The galleries that exist operate in a certain format and the artists end up producing within that sales logic. A space like 32Bis gives more freedom at the level of production, of reflection, of creation.”
Yosr Ben Ammar and the Phosphorus District
Elsewhere in the same coastal corridor, the Bhar Lazreg Phosphorus Creative District represents the principle of self-organization in the most legible way. It began, according to his words Yosr Ben Ammarwhose gallery anchors it, “in a very organic way. We were different people who settled here spontaneously and found that there was a very interesting potential between us.”
The name came from the streets themselves: Rue du Phosphate which runs next to Rue de l’Or. The district now hosts around 20 spaces that combine galleries, design studios, architecture practices and Nine, Tunisia’s first lifestyle hotel, born to accommodate the digital nomad population passing through Tunis.
Yosr Ben Ammar Gallery is, in its own trajectory, a condensed history of how the contemporary Tunisian scene is built by individuals. It first opened in 2006 with a founding logic that Ben Ammar describes as explicitly driven by the ecosystem: “My goal was to work with established artists who would act as locomotives for younger, lesser-known artists. Established artists would pull others up.”
At a time when Tunisia did not have a public museum for contemporary art, the gallery did the work of education and institution at the same time: “It was the work of a museum, an exhibition commissioner and a gallerist at the same time.”
She is also looking, with obvious dismay, at a structural gap that separates Tunis from markets like Dubai or Casablanca: the expatriate community in Tunisia is present but not yet buying. “In Dubai, in France, in Morocco, there are large communities of foreign collectors who have set up and invested,” she notes. “In Tunis, the foreigners who come are here for work, often transient. They are not collectors yet. But that has to change; we need more investors in culture.”
The challenges Ben Ammar names—from visa difficulties that prevent Tunisian artists from attending their openings abroad, to the lack of a Tunisian art magazine, plus an economy that tests everyone’s resilience—are structural rather than glamorous. But they do not give in to resignation. “There’s real momentum here. We have to keep pushing, because this scene exists, it’s alive, and it deserves to be seen.”
Both Ben Ammar and Feriani believe that building a stage is only viable as a collective project. “We all know that it is very fragile,” concludes Feriani. “We are working in a difficult environment, promoting artists in a place where things are not easy and inaccessible, and it is all privately supported. But we understand that we can only exist, all of us, if we are stronger together.”
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