Uprising narratives at Jaou Biennial 2024

Jaou Biennial: art, resistance and reconstruction through moving images and photography

The timing of this year’s Jaou Biennial could not be more significant. As Tunisia wrestles with the rise of an authoritarian turn in politics, the biennial’s focus on “resistance as the deepest form of love”, in Lina Lazaar’s words, feels necessary. Taking over the city of Tunis, the biennial takes over public spaces across the city, and transforms Tunis into a vast artistic stage encouraging different audiences to engage with art and photography, debates and musical nights.

Organized by the Kamel Lazaar Foundation since 2013, Jaou Tunis has cemented its place as an artistic beacon for the Global South, bridging local and international creators. This biennial fosters critical reflection on universal themes while celebrating the transformative power of cultural hybridity.

Jaou Biennial 2024 opened on 9 October and runs until 9 November 2024.

“Unstable Points”, curated by Taous Dahmani presents the works by Der Greif community artists Ilias Bardaa, Farren van Wyk and Lina Geoushy among others

Taous Dahmani’s curated-exhibition “Unstable Point” transforms Avenue Habib Bourguiba into a monumental public stage designed by Marie Douel. The exhibition features twelve artists and photographers from Africa and Southwest Asia, delving into the fluidity of personal and transnational identities. According to famous sociologist Stuart Hall: “Identity is formed at the unstable point where the 'unspeakable' stories of subjectivity meet the stories of history, of a culture,” reports Dahmani in her curatorial statement. Indeed, identity is constantly under construction, always shifting, uncertain and fragile, and shaped from personal and intimate stories as well as from common, geographical or (trans)national stories.

From one module of the public installation to another, identities are in tension, narratives are in friction and both dialogue with traces of the past. In the formation and development of identities, a multitude of forms and visual languages are revealed by the selected artists from different African heritage. Adam Rouhana, Amina Kadous, Ethel Aanyu, Farren van Wyk, Ilias Bardaa, Jasmin Daryani, Lina Geoushy, Louisa Babari, Maram Nairi, Mobolaji Ogunrosoye, Sameer Farooq, and Yasmine Belhassen are the authors behind the twelve pavilions and micronarratives hinting at a universal contemporary search for recognition.

For a mythology of the Coloured self

“Mixedness Is My Mythology” by Farren van Wyk explores the historical relationship between South Africa and the Netherlands: one that revolves around the connections and contradictions of migration, ethnicity, colonialism and apartheid. She was born in South Africa in 1993, the official last year of the apartheid era that classified her as “Coloured”. As her grandparents were forcefully removed and her parents chose to raise her in The Netherlands from the age of six, she’s experienced what it means to live in-between two cultures without really belonging to any of those. “Being neither black nor white, a person of color is a shade of gray in which everything is possible. In this gray area, I use photography to reclaim and redefine what being a person of color means,” states van Wyk.

Remapping North African identity(ies)

Ilias Bardaa’s “Maghrebine”, shot over the last three years and (forever) ongoing, is a personal and collective research into the identity of the Maghreb and Amazigh diaspora people living in the Netherlands, such as him. Growing up in the Netherlands from Moroccan parents, Bardaa started utilizing photography as a tool to deconstruct and rebuild his heritage, paying homage to the Amazigh people, who are the indigenous inhabitants of what is now known as the Maghreb region. Through his ongoing work, a new map with no borders has been reimagined, one merging the countries from said diaspora and showcasing its people.

Trailblazers and archival activism

Egyptian artist Lina Geoushy employs a distinctly archival approach to explore feminist legacies in her work "Trailblazers." Through her photographs, which are strikingly juxtaposed with archival materials that highlight an Egypt at odds with contemporary society and attitudes, Geoushy seeks to deconstruct and challenge prevailing perceptions of patriarchal power. She has created an archive driven by a feminist impulse, collecting popular cultural materials that depict and describe acts of female achievement and struggle. From this archive, key figures emerge: Egyptian feminist trailblazers in art, science, law, activism, and the military.