Monia Ben Hamouda — La Ferme du Buisson — Point de vue — Slash Paris

Monia Ben Hamouda — Post-Scriptum @ La Ferme du Buisson, Centre d’art contemporain from October 12, 2025 to January 25, 2026. Learn more Drawing on cultural and religious symbolism, she creates a ritual visual language in which laser-cut steel forms are dusted with spices in a gesture that coats them and endows them with a sensual force. A creation anchored in exteriorization, but one that also expresses the need to give form to the impossibility of repressing identities (her own first among them) and to articulate the tensions between religious tradition and the political present. By inventing her own form of rituality, Monia Ben Hamouda reintroduces into the spectacle of the exhibition a conceptual articulation that interrogates practices, devotions, and commitments of immemorial art forms, up to the most contemporary.

For behind the apparent gravity, behind the “baroque” whirls that inscribe chance within signs, Monia Ben Hamouda traces a meaning without signification but not without direction—a dynamic link between realities her sculptures bind together. From seduction to violence, from sensory flattery to oppression, her exhibition at La Ferme du Buisson articulates at the very heart of its inquiry a breath of rage that becomes part of the formal vocabulary of her creation.

History, geography, politics, expression, and abstraction intertwine here in a wordless prose that is far from being an end in itself. On the contrary, their installation within space marks the beginning of a journey whose mass, smell, and very life—inscribed through oxidation and above all through the artist’s final intervention—undermine the trap of visual seduction and its mythified exoticism. The journey is not only that of the viewer but that of the relationships that have travelled toward them. Employing signs of an ancestral tradition and following in the wake of the Hurufiyya movement—which, in the mid-20th century, developed an art derived from the abstract forms of traditional Islamic calligraphy—her creation, weighted with these histories, animated by the stakes of an art history dominated by its Western perspective, and enriched by her own freedom (Ben Hamouda herself not fully mastering the language), asserts itself through its monumentality and its resistance to circumscription. Doubt and suspense are not merely plastic: they persist in the meaning of the works, in the detours they sketch by disruption (a bird’s wing, a face, a silhouette appear here and there) to blur a message that becomes precisely this: vestiges, ruins, installations are never released from meaning; they must always be activated.

This culminates in a focus on the ancestral gesture of deliberately applying a “marking” substance onto a surface—a gesture that here becomes a work in its own right through this essential decision: isolating it and presenting it before others to make of it a shared bridge between two consciousnesses, the primary vehicle of a dialogue, verbalized or not.

Behind the codes of traditional calligraphy and the institutional installation lies a reflexive and frontal relationship to art history, through the history of her own, that drives this monumental installation. Spatially invasive and seeping into our bodies through the strength of its scent, the total proposition of Post-Scriptum seems to mark the advent of an era that no longer feeds solely on words but cannot help returning to facts.

Nothing here is straight; everything is oblique. The signs signify nothing other than their own blunt force and, through the marks of projection and their very process of corrosion, fully compel us to experience the violence she inflicts upon her creation—prohibiting any inertia toward a world that art must inhabit as witness and invest as messenger.