Ali Tnani │Studio Residency
Switzerland
3 months
Born in 1982 in Tunis, Ali Tnani is a Tunisian contemporary artist based in Tunis. He received his Masters in 2007 from the Institut Supérieur des Beaux-arts of Tunis and has since exhibited widely and participated in international residency programs.
A leading practitioner in the field of conceptual art, Tnani is known for his multimedia installation work examining social issues in post-revolutionary Tunisia. With a practice that draws on installation, drawing, and photography, he explores the question of erasure and the negative in narratives of traces, memory and history in an era of hyper-connectivity.
Tnani conceives the trace, as a semiotic index or remnant, an extension of his notion of “counter-spaces” that are simultaneously plastic and political. These sites shed light on the inherent contradictions and open a space for questioning hegemonic utopic narratives. These disruptive spaces expose the phantom signs of history in contemporary life: that which has been written, is being written and will be rewritten again in the future. Both material and immaterial form are visually reflected in his drawings where pigment and lead-mine residue seem to vanish into the surface of the paper.
He has participated in various solo and group exhibitions internationally, including the 13th Biennial of Dakar, the Musée du Bardo in Tunis, the Plateforme de création contemporaine in Paris, the 5th Marrakech Biennial, the Musée de Carthage in Tunis and the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Mons (Belgium), the Musée du Montparnasse in Paris and the Biennial of young artists from Europe and the Mediterranean in Skopje, Macedonia. His work is part of private collections in France, USA, and the UK.
