FAKHRI EL GHEZAL

Born in 1981 in Akouda (Tunisie). Fakhri el Ghezal lives and works in Akouda.

Born in 1981 in Akouda, Tunisia, Fakhri El Ghezal is an independent Tunisian visual artist and filmmaker whose practice includes silver-based photography, video, painting, drawing and calligraphy, as well as hybridisations between these media. Between 2008 and 2021, he worked as a pyrographic painter under the pseudonym “Ibrahim Màtouss”. From 2016, he practised calligraphy and tagging under the pseudonym [Weld Hlima].

El Ghezal’s work is “always about light, manifestation by light and in light”, writes Moroccan author and philosopher Arafat Sadallah. The light that emerges through the devices of buried memory, through traces that have passed and been revealed. In his text “Traces, le travail photographique de Fakhri El Ghezal (2012)”, Ismaël writes “Photography works on the body of the person who works on it, in a perpetual resonance, in an incessant back-and-forth between the memory of the flesh and the flesh of the image. Images, too, are evanescent traces on the skin of photography. Faces and images. Bodies and photographs. These are the two poles around which Fakhri El Ghezal’s photographic work obsessively revolves. In a long, slow movement, the pickaxe rises into the air and then plunges into the earth. Year after year. The same dual gestures of seeding through injury. Then, the fertile patience of letting the fruit slowly appear. And to harvest it. Each time the same. Each time different. Back and forth. Faces and images. Bodies and photographs. Black and white. Politics and intimacy. Fiction and documentary. The self and the other.

Fakhri El Ghezal graduated in Fine Arts from the Institut Supérieur des Beaux-arts in Tunis and in Art and Communication from the Institut des Beaux-Arts in Nabeul. His work has been shown at numerous festivals, fairs and international exhibitions, including the Rencontres africaines de la photographie in Bamako, Documenta Fifteen in Kassel, the New Museum in New York, the MUCEM in Marseille and the Centre d’art vivant in Tunis. He has also taken part in the Carthage Film Festival in Tunisia, the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland and the Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Festival in France.

I was a prisoner in your skull

La Boîte I Décembre 2016

FAKHRI EL GHEZAL

I was a prisoner in your skull

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