Monia Ben Hamouda's 'Ya'aburnee' Exhibition Explores Homeland Longing at Selma Feriani Gallery

Monia Ben Hamouda's solo exhibition 'Ya'aburnee' at Selma Feriani Gallery in Tunis presents nine large landscape works titled 'Blindness, Blossom and Desertification' (2025). Curated by Anissa Touati, the show investigates themes of homeland longing, fragmented identities, and ancestral memory. The gallery's architecture, with soaring concrete ceilings and rectangular pillars, contrasts with the intentionally cramped installation that evokes a graveyard. Ben Hamouda employs materials like soil, clay, charcoal, and spices on boiled linen, creating earthy-toned landscapes that reference burial, cultural heritage, and culinary traditions. Two marble sculptures, 'Untranslated Fragment I' and 'Untranslated Fragment II' (both 2025), feature unrecognizable scripts carved in beige Thala marble, suggesting communication breakdowns. The exhibition layout encourages a bird's-eye view from the first floor, referencing the female experience in mosque mezzanines, accompanied by merged mosque recordings and news announcements. Ben Hamouda's personal background—born to an Italian mother and Tunisian father, raised in Milan, with summer visits to Kairouan—informs the work's exploration of divided homelands. The exhibition's title translates to 'you bury me,' expressing a desire to die before a loved one to avoid living without them. The show runs until April 19, 2025, at the gallery's purpose-built space in La Goulette, a northern suburb of Tunis that opened in early 2024.