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Monia Ben Hamouda

Blindness, Blossom and Desertification XXI, 2025

Courtesy: ChertLüdde, Berlin

Collection

Monia Ben Hamouda

Blindness, Blossom and Desertification XXI, 2025

Red clay, cinnamon, charcoal, oil, and wax pastels on raw linen

200 x 150 x 4 cm

TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Collection

In Blindness, Blossom and Desertification XXI (2025), Monia Ben Hamouda furthers a series that navigates the delicate terrain between ritualistic expression, bodily gesture, and ancestral memory through the language of materiality. As with the first work in this sequence, created in 2023, this piece emerges from a deeply personal impulse—an invocation of the spiritual and the elemental to reimagine the grounds of artistic practice.

Working with organic and symbolic materials such as hibiscus, green lalo, ashes, charcoal, paprika, red clay, and soil, Ben Hamouda constructs a textured, alchemical surface that evokes the sedimented history of cave walls or earthen altars. The linen becomes not just a medium but a site—one where the sacred, the tactile, and the ephemeral converge. The compositional spontaneity of thrown powders and sweeping brushstrokes mirrors performative gestures rooted in Islamic calligraphy and Sufi practice, drawing on Ben Hamouda’s lifelong training in Arabic script.

This painting, like its predecessors, does not seek to represent but to enact. It is both a trace and a ritual: of movements that are as intuitive as they are deliberate, of a hand that remembers the curves and flow of sacred writing. This act of repetition, mirrored by her calligraphic sculptural series Aniconism as Figurative Urgency (2021–ongoing), brings to the surface an echo of the “warming hand” page used in classical calligraphy—transforming preparation into presence.

Through Blindness, Blossom and Desertification XXI, Ben Hamouda offers a contemplative landscape where vision falters and sensing takes precedence. It is an invitation to dwell in the space between blindness and insight, between blossom and decay—a territory where the body, language, and the earth are inextricably intertwined.