The Three Artists Who Stood Out This Year Are: Chaima Ben Slimen, Nour Touati, and Ehssen Driss. Their Proposals, Nourished with Pop References, Do Not Simply Resurrect the Past: They Attempt to Reinvent It, by Recomposing Its Visual Codes, Mythologies, and Emotions.
The Press — Since its opening, the TGM Gallery has created a prize dedicated to emerging artists from diverse backgrounds, schools of fine arts, architecture, self-taught, or other formations. Over the years, the Young Artists' Prize has become an essential event in the Tunisian artistic landscape, and each year, it revolves around a theme that serves as a pretext for exploration, reinterpretation, and storytelling about the world through new perspectives.
For its 4th edition, the TGM Gallery chose to go back in time to a pivotal decade: the 1990s. A theme rich in images and sounds, lending itself to all sorts of plastic hybridizations. The 19 participating artists, mostly from Generation Z, dove into it with great curiosity, revisiting a past they did not experience but whose echoes continue to shape their collective imagination.
"The Computer" by Nour Touati
Born, for the most part, in the era of screens and networks, these "social native" artists distinguish themselves by their ease with digital technology, while claiming a visceral need for authenticity and social lucidity. These tensions, between virtual and real, distance and intimacy, crystallize in their works.
The creations in this edition summon the vibrant symbols of the nineties: streetwear and grunge, minimalist purification, the saturated colors of pop culture, video games, and cult objects like pogs, two-title CDs, VHS tapes, and video clubs — remnants of a world in full mutation. This is the context in which Chaïma Ben Slimen's work "Tetris" (watercolor on paper) is inscribed.
A pictorial device in trompe-l'oeil that links an era to its objects. A daily archaeology of a past where audio cassettes, game consoles, cathode ray tube televisions, desktop computers, and other dishes and utensils are arranged on shelves applied to the watercolor in a sort of homage or requiem to a materiality that is becoming increasingly obsolete.
"Tetris" by Chaïma Ben Slimen
"These are objects that transform the surface into a vibrant visual archive, recalling an era before digitization, where material objects had weight, meaning, and smell," notes the artist, who has already begun exhibiting in various galleries in Tunis since 2023, distilling work that oscillates between material experimentation and conceptual research.
The 1990s were also the years of the digital revolution: the first personal computers, email, the birth of the World Wide Web. Tools that would disrupt our ways of communicating and creating. On the political front, the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, or the Gulf War marked the end of a century and the opening of another.
However, this aspect of history seems to have taken a backseat in the concerns of the participating artists, who preferred a more sensory, cultural, and intimate reading of the decade. The proposals, nourished with pop references, do not simply resurrect the past: they attempt to reinvent it, by recomposing its visual codes, mythologies, and emotions.
This is the case with Nour Touati's triptych "The Computer," where technological memory becomes poetic matter, a mirror of an era fascinated by its own modernity. In the manner of an analytical drawing, it lays bare the social mechanisms of this machinery by integrating different figures and situations.
The computer, Nour dissects it in both the literal and figurative sense to illustrate a metaphorical universe worthy of Lewis Carroll, where the human, swallowed by the machine, becomes one of those tiny elements that compose it.
Awards
This 4th edition of the Young Artists' Prize concluded with the awarding of three distinctions:
- First Prize: Chaïma Ben Slimen
- Second Prize: Nour Touati
- Third Prize: Ehssen Driss
The TGM Gallery's initiative not only highlights the talent of emerging artists but also provides a platform for them to explore and reinterpret significant themes, contributing to the richness and diversity of the Tunisian artistic scene.
