Re-winding the future: Prizewinning Tunisian artist shows in London

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Kaabi-Linke’s work focuses on ways in which geography, political events, and the machinations of culture shape individual lives

‘The Future Rewound & The Cabinet of Souls’, Nadia Kaabi-Linke’s first solo exhibition in the UK, melds urban archaeology with subtle traces of various social, political and economic forces. It is presented by The Mosaic Rooms in London.

Born in Tunis in 1978 and currently living in Berlin, Kaabi-Linke most recently was recognized with the 2014 Art Basel Discoveries Prize. She has also shown at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Nam June Paik Art Center in Seoul; the Venice Biennale; and the Liverpool Biennial. She studied at the University of Fine Arts in Tunis and received her PhD from the Sorbonne.

Reflecting the artist’s global perspective, Kaabi-Linke’s work focuses on ways in which geography, political events, and the machinations of culture shape individual lives. These ideas have been in play for some time now, but Kaabi-Linke manifests them in ways that are fresh, free of cant, and all the more stunning because of their visual restraint.

Her London installation is presented in three rooms of a distinctive house on Cromwell Road, which once belonged to the Austro-Hungarian impresario, Imre Kiralfy. Responsible for many Victorian-era displays at Earl’s Court, White City and Kensington Olympia, Kiralfy presented ‘curiosities’ to a public eager to experience the exotic. That some of his displays consisted of men, women, and children from supposedly ‘primitive’ cultures throughout the British Empire was par for the course. The small banner for Kaabi-Linke’s exhibition pointedly alludes to Kiralfi’s showmanship. Garish and circus-like, it contrasts markedly with the spare elegance of Kaabi-Linke’s art.

The downstairs gallery contains three bodies of work that have the most explicit and conventional visual presence. One comprises portrait photographs in a proper, Victorian-style presentation. Another is a series of ‘relief prints’ made by applying pigment to naked parts of the human body, which then are pressed against forensic film. The third is a nearly square grid of four shallow cases, each compartmentalized as though a specimen drawer for someone’s insect collection, or a type case left over from an old-school compositing shop.

The photographs portray South African persons whom Kiralfy displayed as generic examples of exotic savages. While researching Kiralfy’s ‘Greater Britain’ exhibition of 1899, Kaabi-Linke and The Mosaic Rooms’ staff curator Rachael Jarvis found that Kiralfy’s savages were actually highly Westernized individuals from South Africa, who had been costumed to appear as primitives. Originally presented as a generic group, Kaabi-Linke restored their individuality by cutting out and presenting each face in its own oval matt and delicately ornamented rectangular frame. Displayed like this, they prompt a greater sense of person-to-person encounter.

The prints made from impressions of fragments of bodily surfaces are interesting visually, but very abstract overall, appearing as little more than studies in texture and shape. As such, their overall content, which concerns domestic violence, does not communicate very effectively. In only one instance, an imprint of skin that appears to have been brutally and repeatedly lacerated, is there a palpable sense of abuse.

Each of the ‘specimen cases’ is divided into 100 small compartments. The cases themselves are arranged two-over-two, with a narrow, criss-cross gap between them all. The resulting cruciform void can be taken as reference to the cross that marks Christian military graves. This possibility is reinforced by small amounts of soil held in the tiny glass vials set within each compartment. The soil comes from the grave sites of Second World War soldiers who died while fighting in Tunisia. Another layer of meaning comes from their resemblance to recycled type cases that, in Germany, are used for storing tiny souvenirs. Kaabi-Linke’s spouse and collaborator, Timo Kabbi-Linke, notes that after such mementos have been properly placed in their snug compartments, they are generally set aside and forgotten.

The smaller upstairs room contains a video installation, titled No, consisting of two succinct, repeating loops. A small, white rectangle of light is projected on one wall, within which floats a pair of disembodied, female lips. On the opposite wall is a large image of persons of all ages, variously dressed, standing in the stark sanctuary of St George’s Anglican Church in Tunis. In a plainsong sort of liturgical call-and-response, the lips recite questions found on the application for a British visa. The crowd’s response, intoned in unison, is always the same: ‘No’. The effect is surreal, at once lulling and disquieting.

The larger upstairs room – like all the others, painted white on white – contains five works, whose presence is not immediately perceived, but rather sneaks up on one.

One is a pair of images drawn in clear, colourless varnish on colourless Perspex. About the size of largish cabinet pictures, their quiet presence is signalled by their scarcely apparent, architectonic frames and the sheen of the plastic. Closer inspection reveals shadows, cast upon the wall behind each plastic sheet, of images from Bank Junction in the City of London. The poetic layering in this work is especially resonant.

Two other elements in the installation call attention to the room’s original, now absent, frescoes and gilded mouldings. One is the massive chandelier rose in the ceiling’s centre, the other is a stretched canvas, painted a gritty but uniform shade of tan, whose dimensions were taken from one of the square panels in the room’s entry doors. Kaabi-Linke created the gritty pigment by grinding layers of paint and gilding from the above chandelier rose. 

Perhaps the most easily perceived artwork consists of lines, traced in narrow strips of brass, on one wall and the adjacent floor. Reflecting softly gleaming flashes of light here and there, the metal strips in Modular II possess a serene, precise beauty. Closer inspection, however, reveals the name of a prison paired with each elevation and its corresponding floor plan. Learning that these lines refer to dimensions of actual solitary confinement cells triggers what best might be described as cognitive dissonance.

The final work, All Along the Watchtower, consists of the massive trompe l’oeil ‘shadow’ of a hunter’s stand, painted across the room’s floor, walls, and ceiling. Lacking a source, the shadow-image exists independently as a visual metaphor for societies around the globe –both those proclaimed free and those that are not – in which surveillance of all sorts is increasingly prevalent, yet whose origins are invisible.