Monia Ben Hamouda
After Totality
ChertLüdde, Berlin
24 February – 2 April 2026

At ChertLüdde, Tunisian-Italian artist Monia Ben Hamouda (b. 1991, Milan) presents After Totality, a continuation of her recent exhibition Path of Totality at Museo Casa Rusca in Locarno.

Over the last few years, Ben Hamouda has developed a distinctive artistic landscape encompassing sculpture, installation, and mixed-media painting. Moving between abstraction and figuration, her practice blends together her Islamic and Western cultural heritage, positioning both of her lineages as influences on her work.

Within the exhibition, “totality” is observed as a metaphor for the present moment, with the exhibition moving through states of collapse and obscurity, challenging what darkness reveals and withholds. The term was originally taken from the field of astronomy, where the “path of totality” describes the area of the Earth from which a total solar eclipse can be observed and there is a brief collapse of daylight from the moon obscuring the sun. But the word also references the constructed form of totality: that of power and totalitarianism, a term introduced in Europe during the 1920s to describe control over every aspect of public and private life.

In her essay ‘Totality: The Color of Eclipse’, Anne Carson writes, “Hard to know how to go on, after the reversal of color and defeat of the sun.”¹ Long feared and mythologized, eclipses have historically revealed how cosmological knowledge operates as power and control. Like Carson, Ben Hamouda turns to this moment of covering-up to describe what is unfolding, using art to navigate collapse, uncertainty, and the possibility of renewal.

Against this backdrop, the exhibition opens with Theology of Collapse (The Myth of Past), made from laser-cut steel panels. The title directly links belief itself to total collapse and to a sense of loss rooted in the past. Leaning into the space, the sculpture’s intricate designs are reminiscent of both mausoleum and mosque ornamentation. Architectural details traditionally reserved for the burial chambers of the dead become indistinguishable from the decorations found in spaces of worship for the living, creating a delicate balance between one world and the other at a moment that seems to oscillate between the two, when the meaning of life itself is overshadowed by power. Looming over the visitor, a sense of physical collapse is experienced and intensified also through the audio piece playing within the room.

It is impossible to ignore the discomfort and awareness evoked by the sound installation as the deep vibrations echo through the gallery. Meant to demonstrate how moments of crisis can profoundly transform language, the audio consists of recordings made between October and December 2023 from two mosques located in Gaza. It creates a haunting soundscape in which religious calls to prayer merge with urgent public security announcements made in wartime, transforming the familiar sounds of the Adhan into an alarming melody. Emphasizing how these sounds shape cultural identity and perception, the result is a powerful commentary on the nature of communication and the emotional strain these warning calls carry.

In the second gallery, fragrant, vividly colored powders have settled over a scene of collapse. With spices traditionally used in medicine, cooking, and ritual practices across North Africa and West Asia, Ben Hamouda coats architectural forms and salvaged wooden beams in dense layers that act as both preservation and protection. These spices form a veil over ogee arches inspired by structures the artist encountered in Spain, referencing the Islamic heritage still found in Europe. The spices extend beyond the objects themselves; scent fills the room, heightening the senses and evoking a resilient presence in response to histories of inhuman suffering. What appears as ruin is counterbalanced by acts of care.

Titled Reversion (Wudu Diorama), the installation also references wudu, the ritual ablution performed before prayer or reading the Qur’an, while insisting on a complete sense of upside-down reversal. In close dialogue with contemporary political realities, Ben Hamouda frames vulnerability and repair as enmeshed. She sees the myth of antiquity as something active and lived through shared heritage. Collapsed architectures thus emerge not as symbols of defeat, but as forms of resistance—revealing cultural heritage as fractured, lived, and continually renegotiated. Within all of this, reversal remains possible, like the moon reappearing after an eclipse.

As if cut directly from the steel sculptures in the first room, the exhibition’s final work hangs from the ceiling, with spices scattered below. Drawn from the ongoing series Aniconism as Figuration Urgency, the sculpture engages the Islamic calligraphic tradition of aniconism, borrowing from an ancient strategy of circumvention. Calligraphic brushstrokes echo the visual logic of Arabic script while withholding legibility; the metal forms hover at the threshold of figuration without resolving into either image or text, proposing instead the same rhythm of appearance and disappearance.

It is within such rhythms that the moon becomes a structuring metaphor. The moon marks time not as linear progression but as cyclical return, attuning life to phases of rupture and renewal. As a witness to creation, it functions as a measure that is continually reset. The full moon, in particular, signals a moment of heightened reflection—when illumination is complete yet already turning toward disappearance.

Reading through this cosmology, totality emerges in Monia Ben Hamouda’s exhibition not as an endpoint but as a disturbance of perception itself. “Still,” Anne Carson writes, “totality is a phenomenon that can flip one’s ratios inside out.”² Echoing Carson’s words, After Totality insists on the uncertainty of the “after”: a duration in which consequences continue to unfold without resolution.

Notes

1. Anne Carson ‘Totality: The Color of Eclipse’ in Cabinet: The Enemy, Issue 12, Fall/Winter 2003
2. Ibid.

Photo by Giorgia Palmisano and Marjorie Brunet Plaza MBP

Biography

Monia Ben Hamouda (1991, Milan, Italy) lives and works between al-Qayrawan (Tunisia) and Milan. She graduated with a BA in Fine Arts from the Brera Academy of Fine Arts, Milan.

Her artistic practice reflects the complexity of her intercultural identity. Drawing inspiration from her Italian and Tunisian roots and cultural syncretism, Ben Hamouda reinvents established aesthetic canons through a process of sign contamination.

Selected solo exhibitions include: Museo Casa Rusca in Locarno (2025); La Ferme du Buisson in Paris (2025); MAXXI – Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo in Rome (2024); MACRO, Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome; Swiss Institute in Milan (2024); Casa Encendida, Madrid (2023).

Selected group exhibitions include: the Taipei Biennial (2025); MUDEC – Museum of Cultures, Milan (2024); Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art, Riga (2024); Heidelberger Kunstverein, Heidelberg (2024); MUSEION Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Bolzano (2024); Kunsthalle Wien, Wien (2023); Frac Bretagne, Rennes (2023); Kunsthalle Mainz, Mainz (2023); MACRO – Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome, Rome (2023).