Silhouettes of bodies suspended in flames and smoke lean inwards, towards us. They are there; cut from iron panels, interwoven with Arabic script, splattered with powdery spices––with red-brown paprika, velvety cinnamon, hot pink sumac, and the cooler tones of rosemary and chimichurri. They also are not there; anti-forms which become shadows through the dust and calligraphy on the white gallery walls behind.
This is an artwork about the opacity and obscurity of violence. It is about bodies that are only too present (there is a there there; there is a human there). Yet these bodies are vulnerable to violence, disappearing from the world of human taste and smell (those spices), the script that envelops and defines them, and from our collective view. We see and get them in a bodily sense, and we don’t. They are legible, and they are invisible.
The artist Monia Ben Hamouda’s Theology of Collapse (The Myth of Past) I–X (2024) is a brilliant response to the holocaust visited on the Palestinian people by the Israelis and the US government (holocaust is based on the Greek term for “whole” [holos] “burned” [kaustos]). Theology of Collapse somehow evades the sentimentality that can tinge the elegiac in favour of something more real, more burned, and frailer. Perhaps that evasion can be put down to the way that the ten panels are tilted rather than stable. Perhaps it can be put down to the shadows on the wall which appear more clarified in shape than the twisting iron shapes. Perhaps it can be put down to the performative gesture of the artist that is raw and unmasked, despite the machine precision of the laser cutting.
The artist reflects,
I often wonder how my gestures can recall certain activist gestures and support collective struggles. How often these acts turn violent towards the artworks, and how a particular gesturality already inherent in my work evokes the gestures of activists, strikingly akin to the stereotypical portrayal of people of the Muslim faith as intrinsically violent and evil, and constantly associated with destruction.
For me, the authenticity of Ben Hamouda’s installation–-its activist gesture, its emotional touch—has to do with rage. Indeed, her studies that informed this installation are titled Rage moving through generations (2024) and Smokes and penumbras coming from flag desecrations (2024). They show us her process of smearing, erasing, and smudging to create heat and form-in-movement. Like the Collapse of Theology, they are visually ambiguous. Critically, they underscore the fact that while making meaning of her work requires that we make logical distinctions, like distinctions between what is there and not there, that is impossible.
Making meaning of the genocide in this moment of crisis (a time outside of history) likewise is impossible. Logic fails. It collapses, along with belief, religious or not. We are left with rage. How we direct our rage is the question.
Monia Ben Hamouda lives and works between Milan, Italy, and Al-Qayrawān, Tunisia.
Artist’s website: https://moniabenhamouda.com
Theology of Collapse is on view at the MAXXI in Rome through 9 March 2025.
Theology of Collapse (The Myth of Past) I–X. 2024. Iron panels painted with spices and powders; paprika, chimichurri, cinnamon, sumac, rosemary, pink kaolin clay, hibiscus.
Rage moving through generations. 2024. Charcoal, oil pastels, ink on ivory paper.
Smokes and penumbras coming from flag desecrations (Ash). 2024. Charcoal, oil pastels, ink on grey paper.
Smokes and penumbras coming from flag desecrations (Anthracite). 2024. Charcoal, pastels, ink on black paper.
Sources
Attilia Fattori Franchini, “NYX. A Conversation with Monia Ben Hamouda, Maude Léonard-Contant, and Gioia Dal Molin,” FLASH ART
staring at the ceiling 