Mouna Karray’s publication consists of photographs taken in desert areas in southwestern Tunisia, her home country. These are areas full of minerals, including phosphorus, of which Tunisia is one of the main suppliers on the global scale. Population groups who earn their living in this area are totally marginalized and neglected by the authorities. The area is being emptied of value and the soil is being impoverished, with no benefit to those who live there. In this landscape Karray has staged a “body” with no identity, as a recurrent, disturbing element.
Visibility is a precondition of being talked about, as the title suggests; outside the field of vision interest ceases. In Karray’s pictorial narrative a road winds through a sandy, arid landscape. A white bundle at the edge of the road turns out to be a seated person wrapped in white cloth. The hunched figure seems to be withdrawn, severed from ordinary interrelations. The hybrid figure (fleeing, camouflaged and rendered invisible?) moves into various everyday social situations with donkeys, children and unintelligible market scenes. caught by a restless, apparently random lens. The white, vaguely human sculpture in the midst of these transient, precarious and murky situations signals an extreme state of emergency, but also a resistance. The simultaneous clarity and inscrutability of the contours sets a vulnerable culture in relief.
