“Fossils”, 75x50cm
Pototransfer and embroidery on handmade silk paper I 2024 What if the word gallery, Cape Town, South Africa

“Boys don’t cry”, “Stones don't fly” 50x75cm Pototransfer and embroidery on handmade silk paper 2024 A. Gorgi gallery, MIA Art Fair, Milano, Italy

“Above your heads... I’m still weaving...”
Installation videos 2’30 & 26’, spinning wheel (with motor), study table and embroidery 2023, 32 Bis art space, Tunis, Tunise

“Above your heads... I’m still weaving...” explores the interplay between human dominance structures and their natural environment. The narrative unfolds through the perspective of a

Malagasy spider, a creature removed from her natural habitat and exiled by humans to a space station, becoming the voice for Earth’s forgotten tales.

Above your heads... I’m still weaving...Installation 2023, 32 Bis art space, Tunis

Link to the video

Link to the video

“About Hercules and Antaeus”
Installation, videos, old school books, roman sculptures reproductions, photography and collage, 2022, Open Studio

“In Roman mythology, Hercules, son of Jupiter, had to accomplish the 12 labors to purify himself and access immortality. During the accomplishment of the 11th labor, which consisted of stealing the golden apples from the garden of the Hesperides, Hercules killed the north african giant Antaeus, king of Libya ( son of Gaia goddess of the earth..)”

The installation explores how memory is constructed through the production and circulation of texts, images, and objects, employing techniques like collage, superposition, and video to deconstruct dominant narratives. By linking past, present, and future, the installation traces the impact of colonial history from Roman-Greek mythology to contemporary 'space geopolitics.

“About Hercules and Antaeus” Installation wall II at “The shadow cone Decolonial narratives of Overseas” 2022 Group Exhibition, Napoli,Italy.

News From Nowhere exhibition, 2021, GCF Gabès, Tunisia

The project News From Nowhere at Gabes Cinema Fen tries to question the concept of future archaeology in resonance with the memory and political history of the exhibition site in Gabes city. It takes place in the former RCD headquarter (tunisian ex-ruling party from dictatorship times) that was burnt during the revolution in 2011.

“Burnt” video installation 2’32, News from Nowhere GCF, Exhibition 2021

Created for NFNW's exhibition in Gabès, Burnt parallels its setting by being filmed in the ruins of a former private restaurant once owned by dictator Ben Ali on Sidi Dhrif beach in Tunis.
The video, filmed through a damaged phone screen found on the beach of Sidi Dhrif, is also shown on a phone screen, underlying questions like the collective reconstruction of a community's self-image, or the reappropriation of a site (symbol of injustice) that has become something of a monument.

The restaurant was also burned during the revolution. Under the police regime, the entire beach surrounding the restaurant had been forbidden to the public, but after the revolution, the site was re-appropriated by the people and even became a sort of local visitor attraction. Families, couples, and fishermen now come to enjoy a beach walk, visit the ruins of the former regime, and take souvenir photos.

Link to the video

“1988/ The clapping ghosts” installation,
2021, News from Nowhere at Gabes Cinéma Fen“ Exhibition

The installation “1988/ The clapping ghosts” transmits one of the first speeches by dictator Ben Ali from 1988, removing his voice from the recording and leaving only the applause, which echoes in front of the burned, empty chairs.

Screenshots from the video "Gabès" 9’ 2018

The video is a trip that goes back in one shot, to one part of the phosphate road to the city of Gabes, located in southeast Tunisia, which is unique in that it is an oasis and, at the same time, a seaport overlooking the Mediterranean. Since its establishment in the seventies, the Chemical Complex has caused environmental damage to the city of Gabes, where the phosphate is processed for export to Europe. Daily the complex pours tons of its toxic waste into the sea of the city.

Link to the video

Visitors are discovering the exhibition
News from Nowhere at Gabes Cinéma Fen, 2021

Nest I, 2021
installation detail
A.Gorgi Gallery, Sidi Bou Said, Tunisia.

“Reminiscences” 2021
Collage of found items 40x40cm, A.Gorgi Gallery, Sidi Bou Said, Tunisia

Traces, series of digital photography, 2021

Time machine I & II, 2021
Collage of found items, 40x40cm, A.Gorgi Gallery, Sidi Bou Said, Tunisia

“Sea's reminiscence “ 2021, Syringe needle on a fossil stone

News from Nowhere, Open studio 2020, Tunis, Tunisia

“By opening the horizon of time and its narratives, by awakening a memory that goes beyond the simple memories of a human existence, the project of Belaïd and Hagedorn extends the reverberations of the sea. The pathways in dialogue that they take lead to the manufacture of a material and spectral memory of the anthropocene pointing thus its ruin and its shipwreck. By making themselves archons and by presenting us these becoming-archives, the artists send us back to this horizon without perceptible limits. The archive has something of oceanic, reminds us Arlette Farge: "Because disproportionate, invading as the tides of equinoxes, the avalanches or the floods. The comparison with natural and unpredictable flows is far from being fortuitous; the one who works in archives is often surprised to evoke this journey in terms of diving, of immersion, even of drowning... The sea is there."

Excerpt from Mohamed Ali Berhouma's text about the exhibition “News From Nowhere”

What may remain 2020
Collage of items found on the beach, 60cmx40cm, NFNW Open Studio Tunis

“What may remain if...“ 2020
Collage of items found on the beach, 60cmx40cm, NFNW Open Studio Tunis

“Double Temporality“ 2021
CollageSmartphone screen layers
on found unknown identity pictures 23cm x 31cm
“News from Nowhere“ exhibition at Mouhit, Tunis

“About accelerating the time process“
Work table experimenting salt crystallization
on objects found on the beach 2021
“News from Nowhere“ exhibition at Mouhit, Tunis

“STONES STUDIES : The Rise and Fall” Intissar Belaid & Moritz Hagedorn, Video stills, 2020

Link to the video

“Behind Neon Lights” video still 2016

“Behind Neon Lights” juxtaposes two perspectives of Abdallah Guech's brothel in Tunis, capturing both its interior and exterior worlds. The video opens with a continuous sequence featuring the ritualistic sacrifice of a goat, followed by a series of still shots from inside the rooms of the prostitutes.

Link to the video

About Behind Neon Lights:

"Behind Neon Lights" is a film about crossing boundaries. It is, in part, the boundary of a young filmmaker daring to intrude into a space forbidden to both images and women, as it takes place in Sidi Abdallah Guech alley, a zone reserved for prostitution controlled by the Tunisian state. However, the film’s radicality does not rest on the overt boldness of this act, or on an excess of willpower, but rather on the unexpected nature of the gaze it presents.

One half of the image, the right side, is occupied by the ritual sacrifice of a goat. The actions are filmed, but the faces of the men, seen outside through the exit door, remain out of frame. The background is filled with the haunting voices of women. Throughout the film, the right side of the split screen shows the steady red flow, a pool of blood in the blue-patterned room, even after the animal has been removed from the shot.

The left screen offers a journey. The door to the alley is open, and what would typically be considered transitional or cutaway shots—without a central figure to focus on—follow one another. We see alleyways, a distant passerby, some hanging laundry. Most notably, a puddle of dirty water on the ground reflects the location, a portion of the walls, and a corner of the sky, its movement evoking a sense of "estrangement" and the "redemption of material reality," to borrow the seminal concept from Siegfried Kracauer’s Theory of Film. It’s striking that unrestricted visibility, approached with a somewhat ironic sense of "redemption," in its deeply materialist conception, is introduced in Kracauer’s text through the trembling image of an ordinary alley reflected in a dirty puddle—a symbol of the German thinker’s fascination with anonymity and chance—which nearly culminates in the bloody imagery of Le Sang des bêtes (Georges Franju, 1948): "Pools of blood spread across the ground as horses and cows are systematically slaughtered (...). [...] The reflections of these horrors in the mirror are, in themselves, an end."

Without delving into Kracauer’s hypothesis that the cinema screen possesses the reflective qualities of Athena’s polished shield, it’s remarkable how, from one screen to another, Behind Neon Lights seems to open, perhaps unintentionally, Kracauer’s text both at its beginning and its conclusion, bridging the two extremes of the "camera-reality."

The film avoids making any overt metaphorical connection or symbolic link between the sacrificed animal and the prostitutes—who remain absent figures throughout. Instead, moving against such pitfalls, the film captures empty interiors and ownerless objects, bathed in a pink neon light, contributing to an intriguing assemblage of colors while avoiding any clear symbolic interpretation.

Belaid’s emerging cinema is not driven by will—whether noble or misguided—but by forces drawn from material reality that empty the contents and coherence of overly controlled discourses. Behind Neon Lights is a study, an essay infused with a restless attitude, free of apodictic certainty. In contrast to political cinema that always has something to declare, the filmmaker opts for silence to reveal, untying her images from declarations, promises, or discursive operations. Cinema, in this context, does not preach or appropriate; its intrusive images emerge from operations that deliberately avoid being primarily discursive. To be unsettled, to create: this is the redefinition of the utility of cinematic images.

90’ video still 131', Tunis, 2016

90’ is a one-shot video capturing the interior of a 'men-only café' in Tunis. It features a group of men gazing towards a camera placed atop the café's television, which is tuned to a European Champions League football match. This same video was also screened in 2019 in a similar café’s TV at Gabès during the GCF Festival.

Link to the video

Screening of 90’ at “El Kazma",
Gabès Cinéma Fen 2019, Gabès, Tunisia.

About 90’:

90’ is a video recording, shot from a low-angle perspective, capturing a group of men intensely focused in a café in Tunis. The object of their gaze is undefined, no sound is audible, but it is easy to deduce—given the length of the video—that they are watching a football match being broadcast from the same angle as the camera. This video is not intended for traditional screening or regular viewing. Instead, it was shown in a setup designed to extend the questioning of collective gazes that it provokes, through a reversal: one television broadcasting the video was placed in counterpoint to another showing a live football match. This created an experience of critical observation, where the collective male gaze—far from passive—was observed both in its formation and disintegration over time.

This counterview of the sporting spectacle becomes a study of the workings of a strictly masculine collective formation, observed over the duration. Ultimately, with 90’, Intissar Belaid's images say nothing and belong to her no more than they belong to anyone else: they simply show. What do they show? The reverse of what is seen: the gaze. Its conditions, its configurations, its uncertain possibilities.

from Robert Bonamy's "Intissar Belaid, rester radical (en douce)" for the periodical Incertains Regards (2019)

Alif Lam Mim Fragments from a ruminating existence, embroidery on transparent fabric, 1-54 Contemporary African art fair - London 2017

This series reflects on the impact of media images on collective memory through handmade embroidery, a technique the artist learned from her grandmother and connects to her personal memory.

“Dark realities unfold as stills of a larger narrative about local incidents and shocking images propagated by media in the expansive series of Tunisian visual artist and filmmaker Intissar Belaid – “Alif, Lam, Mym; Fragments from a ruminating existence” that is at once feminine, sharp and full of ominous shadows– “

Excerpt from the Text of Dragos Olea about the selected works from the Family Servais Collection for “DÉRAPAGES & POST-BRUISES IMAGINARIES” exhibition.

Madinat Al Amwat Digital photography A.Gorgi Gallery, 2016

"Al Madina or The Visual Odes to Our Dead Souls" Text by Mohamed-Ali Berhouma about Al Madina:

It is the sprawling city, The fiery octopus and the ossuary And the solemn carcass. And the paths here stretch infinitely Towards it.

Emile Verhaeren, The City.
(...) the old walls rise, like white shrouds. Emile Verhaeren, The Sprawling Cities.

The city has always carried or supported the grand dreams of high civilizing missions. Utopias have demonstrated this by building ideal cities as models for societies where humanity and happiness could be claimed. But these urban dreams remain mere utopias, non-places. Far from this, our urban universe is very real. And we often forget it, we don't think about it. The city, its high walls and buildings loom over us. The city, its endless extensions and sprawling ramifications surpasses us. We are engulfed within it. Our posture does not easily allow us to think about the city that envelops us. It seems rather that it is the city that thinks about us. This too is forgotten: the city is a built incorporation, an agglomeration of the orders and imperatives of a political, social, economic, ideological... in short, systems of control, domination, conditioning.

Fortunately, a few rare beings escape the blindness imposed by increasingly oppressive partitions. They inhabit the city and their free consciousness, their lucid intuitions, open up other paths beyond the routes and outlines imposed by the city. They see and evoke other imaginaries than those administered by advertisements and signs well-established in the corridors of our daily lives. These beings manage to subtly evade the city's orders that shape, surveil, and constrain us, precisely because they see. Intissar Belaid is one of these beings. She sees and, more importantly, reveals her visions with a subtle force to let a truth emerge that is no longer perceived: the real.

I was fortunate to witness, in the artist's notebook, the emergence of the works. A precise and accurate intuition follows their genesis. Meticulously, each vision seeks the paths that will crystallize it as accurately as possible. And finely, these visions find their way without yielding to the material weight where art often falters. The work of embroidery, audiovisual and photographic images, and collages was conducted with an attentive eye and hand to capture, throughout the work, the fluttering, the suspension through which the work presented itself to the artist in a delicate yet powerful apparition.

Flipping through her notes and drawings, following the thread of her ongoing creations, an inner voice seemed to emanate from beneath her works:

Embroidering a pain, an anxiety, a wound. Tracing with a persistent thread these memories of a needle piercing unwaveringly through the fragility of marked flesh, mutilated by the burns of a perverse cigarette. This is my body, my carcass, and I offer it to you as fodder.

Tracing a light that blinds me with its terrible and sublime poetry. And from the depths of urban graves, turning eyes to the skies and seeking that glimmer which will resurrect the gaze with every blink. To live, to see to testify. To speak, to shout what drags us down so low. To exorcise the visions that haunt my urban dreams, cutting, gluing, shaping the enchantments of the imagination. To throw into the faces of empty and voraciously blind gazes their scavenging reflections of the pleasures of dead flesh, dead from seeing their souls dissipate in the ethers of fluorescent neon.

To create finally, like an animal struggling until its last breath. To create.

Everything is constellated around a central image. An inscription, a graffiti on a wall. "The City of the Dead." This cry crashing against the wall traces an initial crack. The high ramparts of the city are weakened, shaken. Like a trembling and decomposed image revealing the various layers beneath it, a vision of the city, in all its metaphorical power, appears to the artist. Through these cracks, through these gaps, the city reveals itself and what lies within becomes transparent. The walls no longer protect: they hide, confine, imprison, entomb. It is this reality that Intissar Belaid's works show, open, liberate, and exhume in a series of visual poems as so many funerary orations dedicated to our dead souls wandering in the city with walled horizons, in the world, finally, in the forgotten skies.

(Text: Mohamed-Ali BERHOUMA)

Al Baqara - Embroidery on Transparent fabric, 120x60cm, A.Gorgi Gallery, 2016

Al Madina triptych, Digital photography, A.Gorgi Gallery, 2016