We thought we were going to the city museum, and found ourselves at a selling exhibition of contemporary art.
Tunisia is full of surprises. One of them was sprung on us by a building in the old town (here it is called the “Medina”) marked on the map as the “City Museum.” Either the administration had concluded that the old town is quite museum enough on its own, or the concept had changed in the meantime; at any rate, what awaited us inside was the Grand Prize exhibition for the fine arts of the city of Tunis—the work of local artists, winners of a municipal competition. And a translation of the labels revealed that each carried a price, and not a modest one either, running into thousands of dinars.
Among works of wildly varying merit—a fair few of them naive, and a fair few with an eye firmly on the market—there were several that caught the spirit of the city rather well, as we had seen it ourselves. I am glad to share them with you.
- In French, la mère “mother” and la mer “sea” are perfect homophones—so the title is also, to the ear, “Tea by the Sea.” Whether the artist intended the pun I cannot say, but it is a happy one: vendors really do walk the beaches here with pots of this kind, spirit burners and all, and little glasses packed with fresh mint. That is precisely how tea is drunk in Tunisia—at the water’s edge and at one’s mother’s table alike. ↩︎
- Does anyone else remember those plastic lenticular cards, where the picture changed depending on the angle you held it at? ↩︎
