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2 - Contingency and Resistance: Exceeding Icons through Matter and Motion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 July 2021

Siobhan Shilton
Affiliation:
University of Bristol
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Summary

In this chapter on Tunisia, I show how the dynamic between stability and instability, which encourages a more nuanced understanding of the revolution, is produced through ‘contingent encounters of resistance’. Contingency, I argue, comes to be associated with resistance through its convergence with icons. In the first part, I analyse works that incorporate contingent processes and materials (from bread to jasmine) in installations by Aïcha Filali, Nadia Kaabi-Linke and Lara Favaretto and in photographic series by Hela Lamine and Meriem Bouderbala. In the second part, I examine video work produced in the peripatetic mode: Mouna Karray’s Live (2012) projects static images of Ben Ali together with the unedited soundtrack of a conversation between a taxi driver and a passenger who comment freely on the transitional government as they journey through Tunis. I examine a precedent in Ismaïl Bahri’s Orientations (2010), which focuses on the evolving reflections in a cup of ink held by the artist as he walks within the streets of the capital. I consider how this work anticipates the more extreme limitations placed on vision in Bahri’s later videos. Comparative reference is made to works such as Azza Hamwi’s tour around Damascus in A Day and a Button.

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Chapter
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Art and the Arab Spring
Aesthetics of Revolution and Resistance in Tunisia and Beyond
, pp. 74 - 116
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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