Contemporary Archaeology in Tunisia: An Artist's Talk
Contemporary Archaeology in Tunisia: An Artist's Talk
ArtsLab: Heritage, Urban Studies, and Development Lab Autumn Programme 2024
Date: Tuesday 08 October 2024
Time: 16:00 - 17:30
Venue: Mazumdar-Shaw Advanced Research Centre (ARC), Room 223 / Hybrid option (see website for link)
Category: Public lectures, Academic events, Student events, Staff workshops and seminars
Speaker: Rafram Chaddad
Website: www.gla.ac.uk/colleges/arts/research/artslab/ourlabs/heritageurbanstudiesanddevelopment/#events2024
The artist Rafram Chaddad talks about shared aesthetics and fish ceremonies, identity and future possibilities from the perspective of contemporary Jewish life in Tunisia.
Chaddad’s work is an exploration into Tunisian Jewish history through art practice undertaken over the past decade in Tunisia. His work is biographical and deals with contemporary life and shared aesthetics, photography, textiles and figures. His artist’s talk will discuss ideas at the heart of current events, Jews in the Islamic world, power relations between national ideas and personal identity through artworks, food and photography.
Born on Djerba in 1976, an island off the coast of southern Tunisia, Rafram Chaddad is an artist whose photographs, films, and multi-media installations rethink the archive, migration narratives, and what it means to belong. His work makes the familiar strange and the strange familiar.
Since 2019, Chaddad has been conducting research for Leftovers, an upcoming book investigating how food practices in cities formerly occupied by the Ottoman Empire are inter-connected. The book highlights recipes particular to each place and oral histories around food-making that challenge the nationalization of food and encourage us to approach food as a shared experience.
Based in Tunis, Rafram’s work reflects on his personal life experiences and comments on broader socio-political issues including migration and displacement, identity and belonging.
In 2023, Rafram published an artist's book entitled 'The good seven years', a semi-retrospective of the first seven years of his artistic practice in Tunisia.
Over the past twenty years, he’s created dozens of short films and installations, which have exhibited worldwide in cultural institutions, galleries, and museums, including: Kunst im Tunnel, Dusseldorf; Kunstraum, New York; Kayu Lucie Fontaine Gallery, Bali; Lucie Fontaine, Milan; ArteEast foundation, New York; Halle 14, Leipzig; and Zalatimo, east Jerusalem. Chaddad has held solo shows at B7L9, Mucem Museum in Marseilles and the Maximilian Forum in Munich. In 2021 Chaddad was a guest critic in the MFA program of Columbia University.