Calvino: Beyond The Visible
Ahmed Ben Nessib, Aymen Mbarki, Kamal Zakour, Othman Selmi, Seif Eddine Nechi, Sonia Ben Selem
Curated by Abir Gasmi and Anna Gabai

Organized by the Italian Cultural Institute of Tunis as part of the Calvino In Tunis Series, October 17 – November 30, 2023; Millefeuilles Bookstore, La Marsa.

How can one interpret a story or an idea through images?

At first, the task seems daunting and incongruous. Yet, that is precisely what we asked six artists to do: select a novel by Italo Calvino and translate it into images, even if they were unfamiliar with his work. They had to discover the author, read him, digest him, dream about him, make his stories their own, explore the hidden corners of his oeuvre, and finally, like alchemists, transform his words into drawings.

It is in the corners and crevices of language, in the spaces in between, where a hidden, underground narrative can be found—one that words cannot fully capture, but which images freeze, like a drop of water in the heart of winter. Calvino’s stories are full of these hidden spaces. His books are half-open doors leading to entire universes, and his sentences do what writing does best: they suggest, indicate, and conceal to reveal. His subtly, light, playful, and evocative prose transforms each reader into an imaginary illustrator.

But more than merely illustrating the text, the images in this exhibition suggest what the written word cannot say or manifest. They go beyond the visible. The result is an enchanting and kaleidoscopic exhibition where refined blacks and whites intertwine with vibrant colors, shadows dance with glimmers of light, and tiny creatures find the space we never knew they needed.

These illustrations make us feel at home by drawing on familiar motifs and stories while illuminating new dimensions of Calvino’s prose that we had not previously considered. They transcend their role as mere complements to the text, allowing us to discover a microcosm—that of each artist—whose imagination draws from the writer’s nuances yet maintains its unique substance. The works combine two creative realities that overlap and blend surprisingly, uniting opposites in the same space: classicism and experimentation, light and darkness, color and black and white…

Like the Ligurian author, these artists have embarked on a journey through worlds and eras, using their talents to allow us to experience an aesthetic encounter that transcends the every day without abandoning it. Instead, it enriches it, making it more lovable and comprehensible.

While walking through a Ligurian forest, for a brief moment, it seemed to me as though I saw Cosimo, the Baron in the Trees, dashing among the branches of oaks and chestnuts. Calvino had an extensive knowledge of plants and nature and a profound love for his Ligurian mountains, which rise steeply above the Mediterranean. He could have boarded a ship in Genoa and reached Tunis, moving from one city of alleyways and palaces to another, rich in narrow streets and grand buildings. I can picture him pausing along the avenues of Tunis to observe which trees grow there, taking a moment to cool himself beneath their canopy. During such a walk, he might have dreamed up a new invisible city—a welcoming city colored by pink and orange bougainvillea.

In preparing for the exhibition, I read the books the artists had chosen as their sources of inspiration. At times, when I came across particularly detailed passages, I wondered how these might influence the illustrations and whether those phrases would be perceived as too restrictive. Predictably, I was proven wrong. Each artist interpreted the works through their own unique perspective.

My curiosity to see the paintings grew weekly: What would I recognize? How would the landscape be transformed?

We can recognize Agilulfo, the Nonexistent Knight, in Ahmed Ben Nessib’s work. He walks pensively among bats and lampposts, sleepless and full of existential doubts like Nat King Cole swearing that it will be forever when he falls in love. It is a nocturnal scene set in the dark, deserted streets of a city, which bears traces of daytime activity like the camp in the novel. Yet, the protagonist finds a way to carve out a space for meditation.

The empty armor of the Nonexistent Knight as a metaphor for artificial intelligence—a double-edged sword of our creativity—is perfectly captured in the illustrations by Seif Eddine Nechi. Here, Agilulfo is not the sole protagonist; his squire, Gurdulù, also has a place. The artist thus manages to give form to the dichotomy at the heart of this novel: the personification of rules and discipline in contrast with instinct. The knight’s colorful plume stands out amidst the blue and white that characterize these digital illustrations and echoes the colored pencil drawing that portrays the four main characters as puppets reminiscent of Sicilian marionettes. Here, the rational Agilulfo, the impulsive Rambaldo, the passionate Bradamante, and the exuberant Gurdulù regain a classical physicality that would have been understood even at Charlemagne’s court.

Italian folk tales come to life thanks to the vibrant colors and whimsical creatures that inhabit Sonia Bensalem’s works. In one illustration, a young man sleeps alongside a dog and a cat. In the background, the phrase “fairy tales are true…” hints at what they are dreaming. In another beautiful panel, creatures of the sky and sea gather around a giant resting beneath a large tree: an octopus, many small birds, a few donkeys, queens, and cottages—so many loving details drawn with the same care as the characters in the third illustration, where they tidy another giant’s beard using rakes.

Thanks to Aymen Mbarki’s flowing lines, the characters from the complex novel If on a Winter’s Night, a Traveler become perfectly comprehensible. A play of volumes characterizes the illustrations: the delicate features of people engrossed in reading are framed by bolder lines that guide the eye across the three illustrations. In this work, aged paper creates a welcoming environment for the black ink, giving it even greater depth.

Othman Selmi brings us into the treetops to chase after Cosimo, the rebellious baron who will never descend again. Selmi gives the work a contemporary touch, choosing almost pastel-like colors and capturing all the love the protagonist feels—for freedom, his friends, Viola, and the forest. In the illustration where young Cosimo reads to the bandit Gian dei Brughi, all these themes come together: the young baron, with an open book, sits on the back of the bandit, crammed into a cell too small for him. A blossoming tattoo adorns the bandit’s giant arm, and small trees grow at his feet.

Then, Abir Gasmi and Kamal Zakkour created the three new invisible cities, suspended between shadows and sea breezes. Fiorita, Spaventata, and Pretenziosa are projections of the soul drawn in charcoal on paper. Many of us would love to live forever in Fiorita. Still, we know all too well that without knowing Spaventata and Pretenziosa, we would never appreciate the value of the city where “restless souls find peace.”

The search for the proper nails to support so much beauty led me to a small hardware store, where an attentive and precise apprentice helped me. We chose small, dark nails—discreet yet intense—and hammered them into the white walls, freshly repainted for the occasion. There was a dance of the paintings until one evening, after sunset, everything fell into place, and we left, satisfied. We hung books on the walls to share the stories we had loved with all those who came to visit.

Once everything is in place, there is that slightly dizzying moment when you look around and remember the empty room when everything was still packed against the walls. Yes, something could still be changed. No, everything will stay just as it is.

Calvino would have liked it.

The catalouge “Calvino a Tunisi,” edited by Chiara Comito, will be published by Mesogea at the end of November 2024.

_Abir Gasmi and Anna Gabai

Dialogues is a place for being vocal. Here, authors and artists get together in conversations, interviews, essays and experimental forms of writing. We aim to create a space of exchange, where the published results are often the most visible manifestations of relations, friendships and collaborations built around Sumac Space. SUBSCRIBE NOW TO STAY CURRENT.

The post Calvino: Beyond The Visible—Abir Gasmi and Anna Gabai appeared first on Sumac Space.

I think that we could start by noticing a very intriguing and relevant fact in your life path. You are an Iranian artist who chose to live in Portugal more than ten years ago and, in the meantime, you have even acquired Portuguese nationality. First of all, I would like to ask you what made you choose Portugal – and specifically Lisbon – to live, considering that these places do not seem particularly important in terms of contemporary art (a condition that, we might think, would discourage an artist from another country to move here). Second, I would like to ask you how the Portuguese cultural rhythms and specificities, as well as its distinct territorial scale and demography compared to Iran, have already influenced your artistic practice, or rather, how you and your work move between such different cultural and societal realities.

This question is always the first concern for Iranian and Portuguese citizens when they find out that I chose to live in Portugal. I think this is because for both countries the other one is somehow unknown. But I see Portugal, specifically Lisbon, as a calm place that can easily access the international art community. It has everything that you need in a small area.

I have always been curious about other cultures, what is happening in other places around the world, or the interconnections between people. We all can see how the politics of some countries have an effect on other countries. 
In some cases, like Iran, it is straightforward. But Portugal is one of the last places in the West that I believe preserves its own character. For someone like me, it gives room to think about my project out of the box but within a society that doesn’t have any negative or positive preconceptions about your background.

I came from a country with a history as long as the history of the civilisation itself. Living in Iran as an artist gives you an opportunity to engage with many subjects that can inspire you to create artworks. But, personally, I need a space to think out of the place I am used to being in. For me, Portugal has all of the characteristics that I was looking for.
I got my master’s degree in Glass Art and Science from the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Lisbon. 

During my master’s studies, I had classmates from all over the world, even Murano, Venice. Because the way you look at the glass is very different from the traditional one. Around the world it is common to use glass as they do in Murano – to make high technique objects. So, there aren’t lots of schools in the world specialising in glass art.

For your second question, I have been curious about humans, identities and cultures for as long as I can remember. Therefore, super-modern countries with a character that I believe is a mere copy of other countries are not the places I want to spend my time in. I love walking in Lisbon and smelling the pastéis de nata or hearing a piece of fado. I don’t know if Portugal has had a direct effect on my artwork, but my background and the atmosphere that this country has are part of me and my art.

Your professional career is also quite distinct and atypical: you are a visual artist who first graduated in industrial design and later did a master’s degree in art and glass technology. That connection is evident in your artistic work, precisely because of a constant interest in and attention to certain objects of daily use, which you appropriate, reformulate, animate, duplicate or invoke. I would like you to tell me a little more about the specificity of this path and those interests.

Before I graduated with a bachelor’s degree in industrial design, I got a diploma in painting, which I think has had a massive role in my journey. Also, I believe objects have different characters, so I tried to feel these differences even when I studied industrial design. For example, why does a customer chose a particular colour, this shape or that material, etc.? All of this gives us information that comes from people’s characters or identities. In other words, you can read people through their choices.

I wanted to go further and understand more about identity, communication and self-reflexivity, and design does not have this capacity. However, all the knowledge and imagination that help me create my installations come from my experience as an industrial design student. The nature of glass can be transparent or opaque, hard or soft, melting hot or solid, which gave me an opportunity to think beyond the objects.

At certain times you are interested in precise material elements of daily life – which in your work come mainly from the symbolic fabric of Persian culture – though this is not always the case. Other times you address specific social events or movements whose material delimitation is less evident, as is the case with The Silent Hands that you are currently exhibiting on Sumac Space. There I find a political dimension to your work but above all it also intends to act within the articulations of an oikonomy of appearances, characterising and established within a certain culture. In that sense, I would even dare to say that your work is less about objects as autonomous material forms than about subjective networks, or even a collective unconscious, of which they are expression and a result.

I am working on three rings of a single chain – identity, communication and self-reflexivity – and I express them in all the ways I can. I try to know each material’s properties and use them in my work, but the subject is my priority.
Therefore, although we witness the use of a wide range of materials in my work, the time I spend researching the subject is far more than the actual making of the work.

For example, The Silent Hands is still an ongoing project. I have spent at least three years researching Afghan immigrants who live in Iran and other countries. Almost every day, I have an interview with someone from Afghanistan, or I talk to other artists or journalists working on this subject. The collection of sounds becomes more abundant and more prosperous. On the other hand, I only spent one month making the glass part of the installation.

Despite all this, it is unquestionable how you wanted to become an expert craftswoman, namely regarding glass, a material that you master with extreme accuracy and wisdom. I would like you to tell me a little more about your relationship with glass, its techné and the intuitive processes that are established, in addition to the way this material assumes a special predominance in your artistic practice.

I have experience using wood, plaster, metal, plastic, ceramic and a lot more with my industrial design background.
But I believe working with glass is technically the hardest one to master because what you can do with glass is done in a very short time and in a sweltering place like a furnace or the flame of a glass torch.

Also, because of the thermal shock, you never know what will happen in the next second. So, you need to have lots of patience. I try to find myself while trying to master glass. Glass is a material, a living creature that you have to befriend to be able to work with. In glass science, there are lots of different types of glass, and each of these types has its own behaviour in terms of heat, annealing time, etc., which I think is just like different people’s personalities.

It is true that I am a professional glass maker, but again I use all the skills and materials that I have as a tool for sending my message to my audience. It is easy for me to make a work that everyone marvels at because of its delicacy or its craft aspects. But I am trying to avoid making crafts.

Let’s look at the mirror, another element that frequently recurs in your work and that immediately establishes an intimate relationship with glass itself. I noticed that you invoke it within some associations with certain elements of traditional Persian architecture, but it seems to me that, above all, the way you use the mirror (and mirroring) establishes a mechanism that destabilises its traditional moralising or dominating role in a closed process of individuation. When using mirrors, you are asking us to do the opposite of that, showing that the real and the individual are composed of a myriad of never-stable fragments that always recompose and update depending on the positional dynamic character of a relationship. There I see a strong ethical sense – an ethos – in the core of your poetics, which inevitably develops, as a political proposition for the contemporary world and of the forms of constructional subjectivity.

I can’t analyse myself or even my work the way that other people can do because they are a part of me and my life journey. But I can tell you about some issues that I have been interested in since I was a child and then I can see how they have affected my work.

I was born in Mashhad, the second largest city in Iran. The biggest holy shrine in the world is there; it is one of the most popular destinations for many people. Because of all the trade happening there, Mashhad is one of the main economic hubs in Iran with a huge turnover. From when I was a child, I can remember believers from all over the world coming there to pray. Their reflection on mirror mosaics on the holy shrine’s walls and the whisper of them meant something for me. Many years later, we can see the mosaics emerging in my work. In another example, we see merchants from our neighbouring countries on the street with their traditional clothes.

Politics and history have always been my concerns. But, as a citizen who lived in Mashhad, I witnessed all the ups and downs that happened in the Middle East. With each war, we have seen immigrants flooding our city, and I deeply believe we, as humans, have an impact on other people’s lives. One of the reasons I migrated to Portugal was that I wanted to have a better perception of the human network and interconnection between people. The political flavour in my work comes from my experience and the way I look at the world.

There is yet another evidence, at least in the relationship I have established with your work, that I think is interesting to underline about your poetics. Despite your keen interest in sociocultural forms and structures, in the objects that are born in the Middle East, as well as in the processes of constructing individual and collective bodies within the world, there is always something that is present and seems to escape – almost in a Nietzschean sense of both construction and implosion of shapes¹. That, I would say, could be located in the vocation that your work has in bringing together the chaotic forces of the Earth, an ambivalence between life, will and destruction, that always overcome any attempt to control or stabilise the forms of culture and the supremacy of the individual.

I totally agree with your interpretation. Every day I look for questions, and art is just a tool to express myself. But the more I proceed, the more I realise that I know less. I am proud to be aware of this emptiness. Lots of us are fighting for things that we believe in, but the truth can be the complete opposite of that.

I try to bring these questions to people’s minds with my work: How can I criticise my beliefs? or Do my beliefs reflect reality?

This ambivalence about what I know generates the form of my work. NAVIGATE THROUGH ELMIRA ABOLHASSANI’S ARTIST’S ROOM.

¹ F. Nietzsche, Nietzsche Werke. Sämtliche Werke. Kritische Studienausgabe, 15 volumes. Edited G. Colli and M. Montinari, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1980.

Elmira Abolhassani, b. 1989, Mashhad, Iran.
Lives and works in Lisbon, Portugal.

Abolhassani holds a master’s degree of glass art and science from the Lisbon Fine Art University. The ultimate purpose of her artistic journey, to date, has been to understand how human networks and identities are formed and what their underlying structure is. Her works reflect her attempt to understand the meaning of network systems and, in particular, her role and position – as an individual node – in this complex web, as well as the nature of her artistic task as an interpreter of this all-encompassing network. Her works and thoughts stem from her belief that we must first attain a clear vision of ourselves in order to apprehend significant aspects of our world.
Therefore, as a visual artist who uses glass as the primary material in her works, she tries to find herself while trying to master glass. Glass is a material that can be soft or hard, transparent or opaque, solid or liquid: a living creature that you have to befriend to be able to work with. However, as an artist, she uses any object that can demonstrate her concerns.

Her works have been exhibited in both solo and group exhibitions in international galleries and institutions such as S12 Gallery, Bergen, Norway (2019); Redgate Gallery, Beijing, China (2019); National Museum of Natural History and Science, Lisbon, Portugal (2018); and the City Museum, Almada, Portugal (2016).

David Revés, b. 1992, Lisbon, Portugal.
Lives and works in Lisbon.

Revés is an art critic, independent curator, and researcher. He holds a master degree in Art Studies – Art Theory and Criticism (University of Porto, Portugal) and is studying for a master degree in Communication Science – Contemporary Culture and New Technology (NOVA University, Lisbon, Portugal). David has explored the field of new media and is interested in the way it entwines with art, exhibiting devices and politics of the image. He writes critiques and essays, contributing regularly to several publications, as well as artistic and academic projects.

Dialogues is a place for being vocal. Here, authors and artists get together in conversations, interviews, essays and experimental forms of writing. We aim to create a space of exchange, where the published results are often the most visible manifestations of relations, friendships and collaborations built around Sumac Space. SUBSCRIBE NOW TO STAY CURRENT.

The post Mirroring the Real—Elmira Abolhassani in Conversation with David Revés appeared first on Sumac Space.

Can you tell us a bit about you?

I am a Colombian-Lebanese artist based in Paris. I work in Paris, Bogota and Beirut.
While doing my fine arts and art history undergraduate studies in Bogota, I enriched my core art program with sociology and philosophy courses. These two areas of study were quickly integrated in my creative process up until today. Notions such as ‘Place of Origin’, ‘Reconstruction of Memory’, ‘Identity’, ‘Home’, ‘Loss of the Mother Tongue’, ‘Exile’, ‘Diaspora’ and ‘Migration’ amongst others, echoed in my own life experience and became part of my areas of artistic thought. As part of the third generation of Lebanese diaspora in Colombia and currently living in France for more than 10 years, I am constantly confronted with these subjects. I “weave” my own reflections about them through my sculptures and installations in an attempt to grasp responses. By creating semantic relationships at the heart of my artwork, I aim to invite the viewer to engage in sensorial or poetic narratives.

Before speaking about your artwork in the Sumac Space – Past Continuous exhibition, I would like to have your point of view regarding Contemporary Art. What is art for you today?

Art is today what art has always been, a means of communication, an expression of our cultural context, our rituals and beliefs, our vision(s) of the world and moreover an aesthetic experience that aims to connect the work and the viewer. Art triggers emotions, sensations, arises questions or provokes indifference in the “eye” of the beholder. Art has wished to convey different messages and meanings through its history.

I think that messages and meanings that Contemporary Art wishes to convey are much broader today than ever before and it reaches out to many other fields of thought and discourse such as politics, gender, history and then of course intimate and very personal stories. It has also the capacity of revealing voices from artists of diverse cultures and backgrounds. 

Yet, sometimes I feel that the message that some very interesting artworks wish to transmit is lost because of a lack of context. The message is then totally encrypted and the viewers feel excluded from part of the experience that the artwork would potentially bring them. I believe that this might be the reason why some spectators find Contemporary Art hermetic. I have always considered it fundamental to accompany my artwork with text which helps to open a dialogue with the viewer. I have a personal writing practice and it is in the writing process that many of my reflections and thoughts come together.

You alluded to the importance of establishing a link between the viewer and the work of art.
In my opinion, today’s art has elevated the position of the viewer to the questioner. Accepting this, can we say that today art is no longer what it has always been?

I believe that art has not changed in the sense that as I said before, to me, art aims to communicate. What has changed and what characterises Contemporary Art is the “shape” it takes, hence changing the experience.  For instance, the plural and diverse means that artists use to convey their message to the viewers, make them no longer only viewers but actors of the artworks themselves. In that sense, our way of understanding and seeing art, of experiencing art has changed. I believe that the idea of the ‘viewer as a questioner’ is not new and it is an attitude on behalf of the spectator and his/her desire to engage with the work of art. I would say that, because “images” are omnipresent in our everyday life, the process of relating, interpreting or understanding visual material is more demanding. 

For centuries, only painting and sculpture were considered art. Art historian studies allow us to tell important facts about a particular painting or a sculpture, that can speak to us about their potential use and meaning at the specific time and place they were made. We can tell things about their technique and their materiality. That information may influence our experience in front of an artwork. Art Historians question and sometimes create relations between artworks of very different periods of time -past present- and produce new meaning through these relations. Spectators do this too, in their own way, through their own subjectivity, through their own questioning glance. There is always a possibility of relating our personal experience or not to what we see. In this manner, Art has an inexhaustible meaning and power to communicate regardless of the period of time in which it has been produced. Let it be Renaissance our present time, the art experience renovates itself in the “eye” of the beholder. And I believe that it is in this, sometimes unutterable experience in the presence of an artwork, what makes the experience of art a unique place of meaning for each person. 

You are presenting several sculptures, how are these artworks conceived? What are you exploring through this series of work?

The project I am presenting here is called Speak Mnemosyne: An Ocean of Words and some Middle-Grounds (2020) Ongoing. It is an exploration of language(s) as territory(s) of plural identity, and the function of memory and forgetting is the very process of language construction.

It was born during the lockdown that I spent in Paris. During these months, I did a lot of writing and reading and I began to explore a subject that had interested me before, but from a more personal point of view; my relationship with my mother tongue, Spanish. With English, which is the language in which I did all my scholar years, and which is my language of study.  With French, which I learned at the beginning of my pre-adolescence and in which I also developed the notions of my practice and that nourished me greatly, especially in the field of philosophy and literature. It constitutes my language of thought. Finally, my relationship with Arabic, the lost language, which I try to decipher in my own way and at my own pace.

Our memory encapsulates sensations, images, but memory passes more often through language, through the narration of our memories, through oral and immaterial memory. In this new project, I am also interested in exploring the relationship of language with biological processes related to learning such as sleep and dreams, themselves also related to the processes of memory and forgetting in a scientific way as well as poetic, and even mythological as in Greek mythology, which is a source of inspiration for me.

This series of sculptures is made up of poetic images that speak of this relationship to language and for that I wanted to use words, texts and books -objects of memory. I wish to invite the spectator to reflect on the way in which “immaterial” language “embodies” in order to be able to speak of our relationship with it.

You have mentioned materials. I consider you choose the materials you use in your sculptures meticulously; can you tell me why? Where does this particular attention to materials come from?

I have always been aware of the evocative power of materials even from my earliest artwork and have chosen to use mainly natural ones for my sculptures and my installations.  Let it be raw wool, flower petals, fabric, soap, sugar, beeswax, honey, paper, gold leaf, ashes, metal or rock, each has a symbolic value thanks to the different uses it encounters, its origin or the mythology that has been built round it. The precise choice of materials helps me establish a poetic dialectic that materializes in each piece. Each material has a story and a particular use, and according to this I create relations between them and notions I am exploring in the artwork. In An Ocean of Words and some Middle-Grounds (2020) I use mainly paper, ceramic, paraffin, thread, translucent cloth or translucent materials stones such as Quartz. Most of the pieces are white or transparent and evoke the intangible aspects of language. NAVIGATE THROUGH CAMILA SALAME’S ARTIST ROOM.

Camila Salame, b. 1985, Bogotá, Colombia.
Lives in Paris and works in Paris, Bogotá and Beirut.

Having finished her studies in fine arts and art history at the Universidad de Los Andes in Bogotá, Salame moved to Paris, where she pursued a master’s degree in fine arts at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.

Her artistic practice is expressed through the use of a diversified and often unconventional range of media and materials charged with personal and symbolic resonance. In the form of sculptures, installations, drawings, her work seeks to create semantic and poetic relationships that evoke narratives, fragments of an individual mythology still inscribed in a universal history. Echoing a personal quest around her origins, her work explores notions of place of origin, reconstitution of memory, and territories of affection, as well as emotional and intimate architecture.

Salame was selected to exhibit her work at the 64th Salon de Montrouge, the most important exhibition for young emerging artists in France in 2019. She participated in the exhibition Attaches – Young Colombian Artistic Scene in Paris, which took place at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris as part of the France-Colombia Cross Cultural Year in 2017-2018. Her work was furthermore shown in Beirut at the exhibition Exposure -Young Lebanese Artists at the Beirut Art Center in 2013, connecting her to the contemporary Lebanese art scene.Recent Solo shows are: But I am no more I, nor is my house now my house – at the Rincon Projects Gallery, Bogota, Colombia 2019 and Rose Water and Orange Blossoms at the Arts and Humanities Faculty exhibition space – Universidad de los Andes, Bogota, Colombia 2019.

Zahra Zeinali, b. 1975, Tehran, Iran.
Lives and works in Paris.

Zahra Zeinali completed her bachelor’s degree in painting from the Islamic Azad University of Tehran and worked as an art instructor for fifteen years. She developed an interest in photography and studied analog photography at the House of Iranian Photographers. In 2012, she relocated to Paris to continue her artistic journey as a painter. Later, in 2022, she completed her studies at the EFET Photographie École. This milestone prompted her to explore merging the two techniques in her recent works. Additionally, she commenced her role as an art teacher for children and young students at Le Cercle des Arts in 2022, allowing her to tap into the realm of childhood inspiration.

Zahra Zeinali has participated in several groups and solo exhibitions, including the recent Le Pays des Merveilles, Le Monde Invisible at Galerie Claire Corcia, and Alerte Rouge at Galerie Linda Farrell, Femme Vie Liberté at Galerie Sahar K. Boluki, Artcité à Fontenay, Comparaison au Grand Palais Éphémère, and Figuration Critique à Salon de Dessin Paris, among others.

Dialogues is a place for being vocal. Here, authors and artists get together in conversations, interviews, essays and experimental forms of writing. We aim to create a space of exchange, where the published results are often the most visible manifestations of relations, friendships and collaborations built around Sumac Space. SUBSCRIBE NOW TO STAY CURRENT.

The post A Garden of Tongues—Camila Salame in Conversation with Zahra Zeinali appeared first on Sumac Space.