by Noushin Afzali // Feb. 20, 2026
Monia Ben Hamouda’s work weaves calligraphy, material transformation and ancestral memory into sculptures and installations that oscillate between language and form. In conversation, we traced the conceptual and sensory threads of her practice, unfolding through key works that reflect on heritage, embodiment and translation. Using materials such as iron, stone and pigment, her installations become sites where history is not only referenced but physically felt. In the lead up to her solo exhibition ‘After Totality’ at ChertLüdde, we spoke about how her practice continually negotiates rupture and transformation, attending to the traces left by memory and language.
Monia Ben Hamouda, portrait // Photo by Daniele Molajoli, courtesy of American Academy in Rome
Noushin Afzali: Your work bridges Italian and Tunisian cultural influences through calligraphy, spices and sculptural materials; as in installations such as ‘Theology of Collapse’ (2024) at MAXXI, where spices are applied to laser-cut iron panels. How does your heritage shape your approach to memory and architecture?
Monia Ben Hamouda: Heritage functions for me less as a fixed origin and more as a field of tension. Something stratified, discontinuous and materially embedded. When I work with architectural structures or industrial supports, I am thinking about how memory occupies space in a non-linear way, similar to sedimentation. The co-existence of multiple cultural frameworks shapes how I understand architecture not only as built form but as a carrier of ritual, migration and historical rupture. Spices, for example, operate simultaneously as domestic matter, trade residue and mnemonic trigger; they are volatile archives. When they are applied to rigid structures like laser-cut iron, the work stages a friction between permanence and erosion, monumentality and dispersal. Heritage therefore does not appear as representation; it acts as pressure within the material system, shaping how memory is deposited, fractured and reactivated within spatial form.
Monia Ben Hamouda: ‘Theology of collapse (The Myth of Past),’ 2024, mixed media on iron, spices; 546x750x0,03cm, installation view MAXXI Bulgari Prize, 2024, sala Gian Ferrari, MAXXI Roma, curated by Giulia Ferracci // Photo by Luis do Rosario, courtesy the artist, Fondazione MAXXI and ChertLüdde, Berlin
NA: Many of your pieces, such as ‘Ya’aburnee – Untranslated Fragment I & II’ (2025), explore memory, language and ancestral heritage. How do you translate intangible concepts like memory and language into physical forms?
MBH: I approach memory and language as phenomena that resist containment yet leave traces; acoustic, gestural, chemical and structural. Translation into physical form happens through processes that privilege new forms of knowledge, again through language, but seen as you observe a tree, a cloud. I work with fragmentation, repetition, abrasion, compression, all operations that mirror how memory behaves rather than how it looks. Language, particularly when partially inaccessible or untranslatable, becomes a field of tension between presence and loss. I am interested in the threshold where meaning dissolves but structure remains perceptible. Materials absorb this instability: surfaces hold residues, forms appear interrupted, elements are suspended or displaced. The object becomes less a representation of memory and more a site where memory is enacted. And absence, latency and persistence coexist materially.
Monia Ben Hamouda: ‘After Totality,’ installation view at ChertLüdde, 2026
NA: Your work often navigates the tension between aniconism and figuration, transforming Arabic script into sculptural gesture. Can you talk about this process and how it manifests in works such as ‘Hitting (Aniconism as Figuration Urgency)’ (2023)?
MBH: The movement between aniconism and figuration is not a contradiction in my work but a generative condition, and script already contains a latent corporeality. Its rhythm, pressure and directional force carry a kinesthetic dimension. When I engage with it sculpturally, I am not translating writing into image; I am amplifying its physical impulse. Gesture becomes inscription, and inscription becomes architecture. What emerges can appear figural, but it does so without stabilizing into representation. I am interested in the moment where prohibition produces excess, where the refusal of depiction intensifies embodiment. The work materializes this urgency through impact, repetition, monumentality and spatial extension.
Monia Ben Hamouda: ‘Denial of a Redwing Blackbird (Aniconism as Figuration Urgency),’ 2022, lasercut iron, spice powders 219 × 194 × 0.03 cm, installation view of ‘Remarkably Clear, Almost Invisible,’ Double solo show Monia Ben Hamouda / Michele Gabriele, curated by Anthony Discenza at ASHES/ASHES, New York NY USA, 2022 // Courtesy of the artist, ChertLüdde, Berlin and Ashes/Ashes, NY
NA: Material experimentation is a defining aspect of your practice, from natural pigments to metal and stone. How do you decide which materials best suit a particular concept, and what role does sensory experience play in your installations?
MBH: Material selection begins with conceptual necessity but is finalized through sensory and behavioral response. Each material carries specific temporal, chemical and perceptual properties: porosity, weight, volatility, reflectivity, thermal response, odor. I consider how these qualities modulate the viewer’s bodily experience: proximity, breathing, orientation, duration of attention. Natural pigments disperse and stain; metal resists but oxidizes; stone accumulates time through density and fracture. I choose materials that do not merely support an idea but enact its conditions of erosion, compression, persistence, contamination. Sensory experience is therefore not supplementary; it is structural. The installation is conceived as an environment where perception unfolds through contact, atmosphere and duration, rather than through visual recognition alone.
Monia Ben Hamouda: ‘Monument to Vulnerability IV (Stoning of the Devil),’ 2024, neon, aluminum, spices, 200x145cm, installation View from ‘Exposure – Art, culture, fashion in and out of the showcase’ curated by Katya Inozemtseva and Sara Rizzo at MUDEC Museo delle Culture Milano, IT 2024 // Courtesy the artist and ChertLüdde, Berlin
NA: Your exhibition ‘After Totality’ will soon open at ChertLüdde in Berlin. Looking at this body of work in relation to your broader practice, how does it mark a moment of reflection or transformation, and what questions does it leave open for you moving forward?
MBH: This will be my third solo show at ChertLüdde. I see it as a point where several trajectories in my practice begin to fold back onto themselves. But it does not conclude a cycle, it exposes one in motion. It leaves me with questions about duration, about reversibility, about having or not having hope and dreams. And about whether transformation is ever perceptible from within the conditions that produce it. ‘After Totality’ is an attempt to investigate what happens cognitively and sensorially when orientation collapses.
Many of the elements I have been working with for a few years are still present, but they are reorganized around the question of reversal. Not restoration, but reorientation. I am increasingly interested in how breakdown produces not only loss, but also reconfiguration: how care emerges inside ruin, how vulnerability and protection become materially inseparable, how language mutates under pressure yet continues to operate. The cyclical logic suggested by lunar time, rather than linear historical progression, becomes a structural framework. Totality is no longer a culmination; it becomes a threshold that reorganizes temporal and perceptual experience. The exhibition also marks a deepening engagement with how power operates through visibility and concealment. The eclipse, as both astronomical and political metaphor, allows me to consider how systems of control depend on regulating what can be seen, heard or named, and how obscuration can reorganize perception as much as revelation.
What remains open for me is precisely the nature of this “after.” I do not yet see it as a resolved phase. It is a duration that actually resists closure. Something ongoing, structurally unfinished. I am questioning how long a state of aftermath can persist before it becomes a new order, and whether renewal is ever distinct from continuous collapse. I am also increasingly attentive to how collective trauma reorganizes sensory memory. How sound, scent and spatial pressure become carriers of historical experience beyond representation.
Exhibition Info
ChertLüdde
Monia Ben Hamouda: ‘After Totality’
Opening Reception: Sunday, Feb. 22; 2–7pm
Exhibition: Feb. 24-Apr. 2, 2026
chertluedde.com
Hauptstraße 18, 10827 Berlin, click here for map
