MAXXI Bvlgari Prize 2024
Curated by Giulia Ferracci
MAXXI – Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Rome
24 October 2024 – 2 March 2025

As one of the finalists, Monia Ben Hamouda is showing a monumental work entitled Theology of collapse (The Myth of Past), 2024 at the MAXXI BVLGARI PRIZE Exhibition 2024. The fragmented work, divided into ten spice-painted and laser-cut iron panels, hangs over the visitor, sloping and seemingly about to collapse, simulating the generational trauma and mourning that Ben Hamouda regularly confronts in her practice. Together, the panels outline an architecture that mixes elements from mosque buildings, but is also informed by the very architecture of the Gianferrari Gallery, designed by Zaha Hadid, for which it was conceived as a site-specific installation.

The Gallery’s walls are sloped in the opposite direction, so the work serves as an antithetical position. Halfway between a place of worship and a mausoleum, it aims to convey the need that humans share in the construction of funerary architecture. Her reflections, collected in what she calls a theology of collapse, aim to question the authenticity, authorship and connection between the historical past and the politicized present. Mimicking artifactual relics, Ben Hamouda’s Theology of collapse (The Myth of Past), 2024, constitutes a space of mourning in response to intense contemporary socio-political concerns, particularly the Palestinian people’s struggle for self-determination and the impending violence in the Arab world.