Yesmine Ben Khelil
∗1986, Tunisia
Yesmine Ben Khelil tackles Tunisia’s colonial past through drawings, collagesand diagrams, focusing in particular on the botanical plates of scientific texts andhow these apparently neutral tools were used to construct a univocal narrative, atthe service of colonial powers. Reversing the relationship between knowledge andrepresentation, the artist constructs constellations of images and artefacts that tellan alternative story to the official one. On the occasion of Biennale Gherdëina 9, theartist painted three cut-out cardboard panels, inspired by a Tunisian saying, “Doyou think you can carry the Earth on your horns?” The expression is used to indicatevanity, and is rooted in an ancient popular belief that imagines the Earth carried on abull’s horns. The story is linked to the toponymy of the mountain that the artist seesfrom her window every day, the Djebel Boukornine, ‘the mountain with two horns’:a massif with two peaks overlooking the Gulf of Tunis. Called Baal Qarnaïm by thePunics, i.e. the ‘two-horned god’, it was home to an ancient sanctuary dedicated tothe deity – of which the bull is the attribute and one of the sacrificial victims – asconfirmed in 1891 by the studies of the French archaeologist Jules Toutain, whosefindings may be seen in the Louvre in Paris. “Through the tale of a god who isreincarnated in a mountain with two horns, of men who have sacrificed bulls onthe summit over the centuries, and of the marble artefacts carefully preserved in aEuropean museum, I would like to convey the rebirth of a world in which the non-human and its uncertainty are celebrated, finding a way for a world of myth andlegend to exist within the one where we live, which places human beings at the centreand considers everything around them to be at their disposal.“
Has taken part in:
