A Voice for the Voiceless: How Mouna Karray’s photo set 33°54’17.9 “N 8°06’34.5 “E from her series Nobody Will Talk About Us engages with the growing exchange between local and global artistic discourses

In her series ‘Nobody Will Talk About Us’, photographer Mouna Karray manifests an anonymous white figure into different locations of Sfax in Southern Tunisia. Karray herself is from Sfax, and therefore possess a very prevalent connection to the region. Yet the series, but her set entitled 33°54’17.9 “N 8°06’34.5 “E in particular, exists at the rudimentary border between local and global discourses of identity. 33°54’17.9 “N 8°06’34.5 “E captures the mysterious white figure amongst the rubbles of an outdoor pottery factory. The chipped bowls, dense black smoke and the lone workers reflect the problematic bonds between capitalism and nationhood. As a demographic of Tunisia that remains deprived of general societal development, Karray complicates the perception of globalisation as an all-encompassing entity.

Despite Karray’s focus on representing the voiceless communities, she presents the locations for audiences outside of the depicted spaces. The series was displayed in London at the Tyburn Gallery in 2016 and received acclaim for communicating Sfax’s marginalised voices. [1] Therefore, the photographs possess a detachment that prevails in what Irit Rogoff terms a “historical self-location” of the artist in her paper ‘Oblique Points of Entry’. [2] Karray’s artificial situating of the figure into various Tunisian landscapes raises compelling dynamics between the politics of identity and that of location which worth exploring in further depth. The function of the white figure, the space it inhabits, and the significance of the photographs’ exhibition provide a perspective of how 33°54’17.9 “N 8°06’34.5 “E transgresses regional limitations of artistic expression. By deconstructing the purpose of the white figure in 33°54’17.9 “N 8°06’34.5 “E and then contextualising its function within the space it inhabits, one will understand how Karray’s exists on both a local and global level of contemporary artistic expression.

The figure’s anonymity allows for various interpretations of its functions and what it represents however firstly, it is important to note that the white figure is a motif that exists in previous works by Karray. In her 2013 photo series Noir, she photographs herself bound in a similar white shape. [Figure 2] Despite her curious presentation, her command of the camera clicker reflects her control over the photograph. She, therefore, exercises an agency of self which can be translated into the interpretation of the figure in Nobody. While she strips the figure of any distinguishable anatomy, Karray endows the figure with a life, and therefore a significance.

According to Tyburn Gallery, the figure acts as the symbol of the “dominating alienation and isolation” of its inhabitants, who are “powerless to change their poor social and economic state.” [3] The white figure could therefore represent the restrictions of expression. The white figure is symbolic of isolation, but it is unclear whether it is meant to reflect Karray, that of the inhabitants of the Sfax, or that of the geographical location itself.

The figure might represent Karray’s attempt at placing herself within the geopolitical context of the spaces. In Hamid Keshmirshekan’s paper ‘The Crisis of Belonging’, while his focus is on contemporary Iranian art, his exploration of contemporary Middle Eastern artists in general would delineate the white figure as Karray’s attempt to reimagine the cultural landscape of Tunisia. The white figure is therefore Karray’s resistance of the essentialism that pollutes authentic Middle Eastern creative expression, configuring its purpose as sociopolitical. [4]

It’s degree of anonymity is meant to reflect that of the inhabitants, who remain isolated and remain nameless. This display and attempt at representation can therefore be interpreted as slightly problematic. The unidentifiable nature of the white figure and its questionable appearance might subtract from the real purpose of the photographs, which is supposed to be to represent the lives of those arguable left behind.  

The figure does not actively engage with other individuals in any of the photographs. Perhaps, therefore, Karray bares the figure in order to allow the location to be foregrounded. The alien form does not respond to its surrounding environment, but its pronounced discrepancy becomes what the viewer searches for in every photograph. The figure seems to make the spaces personal because the viewer recognises something within the locations. The viewer, therefore, becomes affiliated or even, to some extent, complicit with what is unfolding in the photograph. The figure is sometimes camouflaged or harder to notice despite its unnatural presence. For example, in a few of the photographs, the figure is overwhelmed by black smoke rising from the clay ovens, or peaks between the legs of a moving worker. [Figure 3]

Rogoff argues that artists produce “acts of dislocation” when they detach from their immediate spatial and temporal surroundings and hence ‘exhaust’ the geography of modern nationalism. [5] The white figure resists the reduction of Karray’s work to geopolitical concepts. This is mimicked in a surprisingly organic way in the series, with the figure inside pushing out to escape its embryonic form. Karray description of the body as, “moving within this universe as its matrix” perhaps situates the figure within a temporal paradigm rather than a physical, locational one. [6] While that paradigm would require more research, how Karray favours the locational qualities of her photographs rather than the individuals to which it is representative can be understood by exploring the context of the space in which is places the figure.

When perceiving the function of space in 33°54’17.9 “N 8°06’34.5 “E, Karray’s artificial situating of the figure into various Tunisian landscapes brings attention to but arguably further alienates the inhabitable spaces of the abandoned demographic. The South of Tunisia is a region that has been “traditionally suffering from a lack of investment and marginalisation”. [7]Karray therefore provides visibility for what Rogoff would define as an ‘aspirant community’. [8] As Rogoff elaborates, “…they emerge from a fracturing” and “struggle ... to define themselves...”. [9]

Karray utilises the figure to represent an ‘exhausted geography’, a term Rogoff coined in her paper. [10] This is done in various ways. One of which exists in the similarly exhausted resources that foster the commodity the photographs capture: ceramics. The figure sits near what could be man-made clay oven as dust and smoke settle on all the surfaces (apart from the figure itself). Karray expands the significance of the space but displaying the location of the creation of the commodity, which could be used locally, but could also reference the tourist market in its significance of Tunisian culture.

Karray is not preoccupied with traditionality but instead reflects the current socio-political atmosphere of Tunisia. Despite their effort to contribute to the nation’s economy, the citizens in the photographs seemingly disregarded by the larger progression of Tunisia. Rogoff evokes Saskia Sassen’s argument that individuals become linked by a “new form of ongoing labour - the necessary labour of citizenship.” [11] Karray reveals the flaws of global capitalism and, more importantly, exhibits the innate connection between capital and citizen. Through an artist, “the very notion of how to be a citizen,” writes Rogoff, must be “explored, expanded, voided and reinvented.” [12]

Karray completed her MFA in Photography in Japan before returning to Tunisia, which not only offered a new perspective in which to evaluate and represent her identity. [13] Her almost documentary-styled depiction of the Tunisian landscapes seems to record the poor conditions in which the community exists. Therefore, the white figure acts as a personal element to the photographs.

The title of the photo set, 33°54’17.9 “N 8°06’34.5 “E, reference the exact latitudes and longitudes of the photographs. [Figure 4] By marking the exact locations, she explicates physical proof of life in these seemingly inhabitable spaces and quite literally connects the photographs to a geographical reality. This artistic choice could be argued to lengthen the gap between local and global levels of discourse, which creates space for Karray’s photographs to risk exoticism. However as Rogoff has noted, “the moment in which one refuses to read the scenario in the terms that it has set up for itself, and instead reveals it to be the mechanism of its own perpetuation.” [14] While the spaces are inhabitable, Karray is in a way, provides a very poetic and ‘beautiful’ space. Tyburn Gallery even describe Karray’s depiction of the spaces as “the unique beauty and vast character of the surrounding landscape.” [15] In order to explore the various interpretations the depiction of the figure and space provides, on much consider the environment within which they were exhibited.

In Sussan Babie’s paper Voices of Authority: Locating the “Modern” in “Islamic” Arts, she considers the “insatiable market demand for utilising what are basically ethnocultural identity markers, often reduced to universalised symbols and geopolitically articulated concepts...”. [16] She worries of a double standard that exists with the discourse of contemporary Middle Eastern art, which seems inherently tied to its politics of the region. [17] The title of the exhibition itself, ‘Nobody Will Talk About Us’, presents a poignant claim, and rejects the qualities of universalism by creating a difference between “us” and “everybody else”. While this creates somewhat of a distance between local discourses from global understandings. It raises the question of whether art is the problem or the language that defines it?

The way the series was presented in the gallery space as clusters add a sense of life, movement and kinesthetic interactions between spaces. [Figure 5] As noted in the previous section, the subjects’ inattentiveness provides more authentic and natural spaces. As Nadour expands, “This exploratory method allows for expansion: from motivation to context, from anecdote to memory.” [18]

The exhibition of art from the Middle East risks what Babaei defines as a reinforcement of essentialised cultural views. [19] Karray strives to resist this reduction of artistic expression. Her work resides in private and public collections of renowned wealthy Congolese art collector Sindika Dokolo, the Ministry of Tunisian Culture and Nadour Private Collection, which houses contemporary art from the Arab world. [20] Karray’s photographs must therefore consist of forms of pedagogical resources of Tunisian history.

Karray describes the white figure as one of defiance that “push[es] for freedom and the re-enchantment of a forgotten land.” [21] The white figure represents the intersection of local and global dialogue growing for artists striving to reach beyond the limitations of their national aesthetics. The interaction — or lack thereof — between the white figure and the space in which it exists provides an exciting application of local and global qualities simultaneously. While situated quite literally in a locality, 33°54’17.9 “N 8°06’34.5 “E offers as resistance to accommodating the fluctuation of globalisation across Tunisia, and thus, places itself within the transculturism of contemporary artistic expression.