Thirteenth International Conference on The Arts in Society

Abstract

It is hard not to notice the increase in collaborative works between Tunisian painters and authors. This paper explores the meeting places between the image and the text in post-revolutionary art from the country that inspired the “Arab Spring,” seeking to understand the roles that the visual and written arts are playing to redefine an art scene once dominated by artistic traditions defined by the French, the Ottoman Turks and the former monarch. The relinquishing of a single creator, and the exploration of the territory between the arts suggests that Tunisia’s new national identities lie neither here nor there but rather in an interstitial space between language and image making. It is the implication of this development that the paper will study through not only a close examination fo the images and texts chosen, but also through interviews of four artists who work collaboratively. The proposed paper chooses to focus on how the new generation of artists draws inspiration from the Brigades d’Intervention Plastique, a collaborative art movement inspired by Hechmi Ghachem in 1988 to reclaim freedom of expression under Ben Ali’s oppressive rule, but then extends the movement yet further to involve both writers and visual artists.