TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary

Monia Ben Hamouda

Born in 1991 to a Tunisian family in Italy, Monia Ben Hamouda is a Tunisian-Italian visual artist whose practice is deeply entwined with questions of identity, heritage, and transcendence. Living and working between Milan, a hub of contemporary European culture, and al-Qayrawan—one of the oldest and most spiritually resonant cities in North Africa—Ben Hamouda navigates the tensions and harmonies between these two rich cultural worlds.

Her work emerges from the crucible of her dual heritage, and it offers a visceral, often poetic commentary on the diasporic condition. Through installation, sculpture, drawing, and performance, she conjures potent symbols drawn from Islamic iconography, Arabic calligraphy, and Mediterranean aesthetics, reconfiguring them in bold, experimental forms that blur the boundaries between abstraction and figuration.

Ben Hamouda's art is noted for its sensitivity to the ephemeral and the sacred. Burnt wood, metal structures, and ash—materials marked by transformation—frequently recur in her work. These elements speak to processes of erasure, remembrance, and reconstitution, as she grapples with the traces of trauma and spirituality carried across generations. Her installations often invite viewers into environments that feel both ceremonial and confrontational, where the unseen weight of history hangs in the air.

A graduate of the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan, Ben Hamouda has exhibited widely across Europe and the MENA region, steadily gaining recognition for her compelling fusion of mysticism, memory, and material experimentation. Her practice does not merely explore identity as a fixed concept, but rather insists on its fluid, performative, and often volatile nature—shaped as much by migration, translation, and loss as by ritual and belief.

Whether drawing from the mystical Sufi traditions of her ancestral city, or deconstructing Western narratives of the "Oriental," Monia Ben Hamouda creates art that inhabits an in-between space—unsettling, evocative, and defiantly personal.

More about the artist and her artistic practice: https://moniabenhamouda.com