Surrealism and Power in Contemporary Tunisian Art: Sculpture by AÏcha Filali and Houda Ghorbel

• Published in: ASAP journal 2022-09, Vol.7 (3), p.499-521
• Main Author: Butler, Anne Marie E
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: 20th century; Arab culture; Authoritarianism; Colonialism; Contemporary art; Education; Medicine; Modernism; Nation states; Political power; Political representation; Politics; Sculpture; Sexuality; Society; Surrealism; Visual artists
• ISSN: 2381-4705; 2381-4721; 2381-4721
• DOI: 10.1353/asa.2022.0031

Some questioning along this line is found in Tunisian art pioneer Hatim El Mekki's approach to artmaking, which Jean Goujon describes as ceaselessly questioning the world through images.3 Tunisia can be seen as one such exploitative society where surrealism can help to expose the "pseudo-real" of the state. In The History of Sexuality, Foucault asserts that in Victorian Europe sex (sexuality and sex acts) was mobilized within particular arenas such as medicine, education, and the family, thereby creating discourses that constructed sex on the terms of these institutions.10 This essay does not focus solely on sex but instead translates the impulses of Foucault's argument to the Tunisian context in order to characterize how such power mechanisms operate there. In accordance with Foucault, I contend that the state apparatus does not apply direct power, but instead, its domain is constituted through the interworking of "the machinery of production," in the case of Tunisia, in arenas like education and cultural production.11 In this conceptualization of the relationship between the state and society, the will of the state is normalized as the will of society, meaning that society reproduces and upholds the state apparatus.12 Laryssa Chomiak attends to suppression's productive capacities under Ben Ali, stating, "[a]lthough the regime of Ben Ali attempted to obliterate oppositional voices, its oppressive strategies increasingly fueled dissent. "15 As Mounira Charrad demonstrates, Tunisia emerged from colonialism led by a president who instituted modernism and liberalism as part and parcel of a democratic government modeled on European structures; the state became autonomous from kin groups and tribal law instead of incorporating structures of a precolonial monarchy into the new nation-state, as in Morocco, or integrating tribal and kin-based laws into the constitution, as in Algeria.16 Tensions between binaries such as modern and traditional, liberal and repressive, and religious and secular produce the circumstances under which Tunisian art as a whole has trended toward subtle critiques of the state and society, particularly in the pre-2011 era.