Nor
Curated by Emanuele Guidi
Barth, Bressanone
28 March – 31 July 2026

Monia Ben Hamouda chose to intervene in the central hall of the Kunstraum barth with a unique work that unfolds over approximately forty square meters, detached and parallel to the floor; an emerging, indefinable formation that seems to rise from below to occupy the entire architectural volume, saturating it with forms, colours, and scents, while remaining heavy and anchored to the ground.

It is an assemblage of plates with different contours, thickness-es, and materials, fixed in this configuration for the duration of the exhibition; yet, like a geomorphological structure movement and transformation in potential it will find new arrangements in dialogue with the architectures that will host it in the future.

Monia Ben Hamouda decided to work with brass, aluminium, wood, and glass, after seeing them at work in the factory, during a visit 2025, and recognizing their latent potential. Therefore, the invitation offered the opportunity to open a new trajectory, experimenting with materials and merging them with her most recent conceptual and formal research. The surfaces are, in fact, carved with those curvilinear inscriptions that we are learning to recognize in her work: fluid lines that evoke Arabic calligraphy, yet they are neither writing nor translatable message. Ash, kaolin, and cinnamon powders— also central to her practice— are scattered and settle into stratified layers of varying density.

NOR thus manages to subvert the linearity of time: new, polished, and shiny fragments, carved and furrowed by contemporary technologies, are dusted with ancient powders, carriers of stories, and appear as the result of an extremely slow temporal action. Her engravings enhance the sense of facing what the Western eye has historically claimed to define as “discovery.” Following this “predatory” and “classifying” disposition, the work instead interrogates the viewer about the politics of the gaze, its power relations, and hierarchies.

NOR II (Transhistorical), is, in fact, a large sculpture rooted in its horizontality and proposes—rather than undergoes—the ideal point of view from which to be observed: the public is invited to climb and look from the internal balcony to get a complete vision of its monumentality, which integrates into the architecture, transforming it. This choice reflects Monia Ben Hamouda’s site-specific approach, always seeking dialogue with the hosting space. It happened in 2023 at the Museo MAXXI in Rome, where she challenged the verticality designed by Zaha Hadid, placing the public at the base of a wall suspended between ascent and fall; it happened more recently in 2025 at the Selma Feriani Gallery in Tunis, where nine horizontal canvases became an ‘environment,’ especially when experienced from above. Perspective and proxemics are tools through which the artist transposes the audience into a spatiality dense with her historical, political, cultural, and visual references.

NOR thus activates a history of the relationship between gaze, as a tool of control, and horizontality. From a higher vantage, we adopt an aerial, panoramic, ‘dominant’ viewpoint, projecting it onto the work to interpret and define it. It is the history of geography, as a form of writing imposed on a vast territory, splitting it through linear and Euclidean boundaries; the history of archaeology, which digs the earth to remove artifacts and knowledge to enrich distant institutions; the history of capital, which partitions the domain of the natural to extract rare earths and raw materials.

Not least, the bird-eye view makes us assume the perspective of the satellite eye, the artificiality of the drone, and narrates contemporary territories now reduced into rubble. In the upper gallery, the wall-mounted sculpture Nor (Politics of Disappearance), reads almost like a model—map and representation—in its reduced scale and verticality.

It is legitimate to ask whether all these references and interpretations belong to the work we are observing. The answer is perhaps announced by the title itself: NOR. A conjunction that unites and establishes a relational space through negation. Neither one nor the other of these suggestions is sufficient to define the work in its entirety. A “connective negation” that thus resists the claim of totality and makes coexistence possible. Monia Ben Hamouda describes her work as “a non-language, a non-semantics, a non-territory.” Not a lack, but the removal of interpretive grids that eases the encounter between multiple categories, practices, and histories. A form of neutrality (from neuter: neither one nor the other) that assumes a flooding attitude, blurring boundaries and uniting seemingly fixed identities—as revealed by the use of materials and co-lours in her sculptural practice.

I leave it to the audience to decide whether this neutrality can resonate in some way with Alexander Langer’s choice of “not choosing,” – a stance that, in this region, has become a deliberate political position.

Emanuele Guidi, 2026