For several years I have been working on my long-term project “The Patterns of Ferdousse”. A new body of works -videos and photographic series- is presented at La Boîte, a contemporary art center in Tunis.

Upon listening, it is a soft voice with vivid accents that, from the outset, paves its way and welcomes us with no introspective heaviness. And on screen, it is a face with hazel eyes and meticulous gestures that halt us in our tracks without dramatization.

(…) Mouna Karray, who made “La coupure” in 2004 – a work of mourning over the missing image, after her father’s passing – returns, two decades later, with a memory work on The Patterns Of Ferdousse.

(…) “The Patterns Of Ferdousse” cannot be reduced to a one-to-one evocation. There is no doubting the strength of the bond, but it is not the artist’s relationship with her mother – a biographical theme that is been explored at length – that is at stake here.

For Mouna Karray has no intention of reconstructing the episode in its entirety and in wide vision, as necessary as such a reconstruction may be. The gesture – and this is what this two-pronged, long-term approach is all about – is rather a shared gesture: for both, it is about crossing the warp and weft of time’s switchbacks”.

Adnen Jdey
Extract from “Memory in gesture”, text of the exhibition.