Naima Morelli

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memonadiakaabilinke

“I never decide in advance why I want to talk about a subject; it just arises from the context. The wall in particular is a symbol that speaks to me strongly,” says Tunisian-Russian artist Nadia Kaabi-Linke, to explain her new work at Dallas Contemporary gallery. “For me, walls mean separation. But walls are also skins that say something about a city and the people who live there in hidden ways,” she observes. “I have always been interested in revealing the invisible.”

Nadia Kaabi-Linke was born in Tunis in 1978 to a Russian mother and Tunisian father, she studied at the University of Fine Arts in Tunis before receiving a PhD from La Sorbonne in Paris. Her installations, objects and pictorial works are embedded in urban contexts, intertwined with memory and geographically and politically constructed identities. She currently has a solo show, called “Walk the Line”, at Dallas Contemporary in Texas, USA, from September 20 until December 21. I have interviewed Nadia for Middle East Monitor , asking her about her personal path through art, the Tunisian contemporary art scene and the theme of migration in her work.

Here’s the link to the piece

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In Melbourne one of the first questions people ask you is “where do you come from?”.
It makes sense in a city where hostels are flooding with drunk people swearing in so many different languages.
There are backpackers coming here with a sheer party mentality, europeans seeking for a well-payed job as waiters and wannabe adventures romantically compelled by soil their hair with red dust, possibly riding through the desert on a rusty jeep (that’s me, and I sadly found out that there is not that much desert in Victoria).

The prosaic reality of Melbourne city clashed so hard with my fantasy – eating Kangaroo on a red rock with aboriginals people – that I decided to keep myself busy with what is supposed to be my main job: contemporary art.
Well, the truth was that I was already in Melbourne to complete the last stages of my reportage about Indonesian contemporary art, so I found myself turning on the recorder and listen to the artist Tintin Wulia.
It was the first interview here in Melbourne and one of the last interviews for my reportage about Indonesia Contemporary Art.
Her work and her experience as an artist epitomized the core of my book: there is no such a thing called Indonesian art, there are some practices born in a geographical segment called Indonesia, and there are some artists born in Indonesia that are making art.
The edges are so sharp just on the map – ideas and aesthetic are much more fluid – yet these borders matter incredibly when comes to bureaucracy, biennales pavilions and personal identity.

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