Resounding Images and Distances

Silke Schmickl : Ismaïl, you are a visual artist from Tunisia living and working in Paris. We met in 2008 while preparing the third edition of our DVD collection Résistance[s], dedicated to avant-garde film and video art from North Africa and the Middle East. Since then we have worked on several other projects together, such as Human Frames, an important video art exhibition that took place at KIT – Kunst-im-Tunnel museum in Düsseldorf this summer and which will be released on DVD by the end of the year. We have also shown some of your drawings and photographs at art fairs, in Martinique in 2009 for the Marché d'Art Contemporain du Marin and last year in Istanbul at ARTIST contemporary art fair. Your body of work includes different media and techniques. Which are your favorite artistic media?

Ismaïl Bahri : I work mainly with video and drawing but it happens that I have recourse to other media like photography. For each of my projects I try to develop a framework that allows me to observe and capture subtle phenomena and that's where video essentially steps in, as a tool for recording.

SS : Your video Résonances, featured on Résistance[s] III, combines video, visual writing and sound. Can you tell me more about the genesis of this work and its production context?

IB : Résonances is my first video. In retrospect, it looks like a beginner's piece to me. I shot this video over two weeks in the bathroom of my parent's house in Tunis. Its structure developed day by day, while I was filming. In the beginning, I just wanted to experience how to look at this place through filming, but then, little by little, I became interested in interfering, in writing on the inner surface of this space, to use it as a receptacle for writing and thoughts. An evolution was taking place: the video starts with shots that are very aseptic and aestheticized, and moves on to show a kind of blurred cosmogony in the end.

SS : The bathtub is an intimate space, situated in the house of your childhood and is sealed, isolated from the outside world. However the video seems to evoke other places …

IB : The use of writing, cartography and sounds that stem from insects and landscapes aims to open up this capsule built in human proportions in order to resound with other landscaped, cosmic and acoustic elements. In the course of my research I realized that this tub could become the inverse counterpart of a welkin; the imaginary sphere on which celestial bodies appear to be projected.  The appearance of words written in ink on the inner surface of the tub takes the shape of a constellation of stars. During the editing, nightfall was accompanied by the chirping of crickets, recorded around the house. In short, I wanted to explore the excess of the senses, images, landscapes and sounds.

SS : Ink is a recurrent media in your work. I am thinking of the photo series Sang d'encre, accomplished in 2009, and one of your most recent video works, Orientations, shot in 201

IB : I use ink as an element of appearance and infusion. In Sang d'encre for instance, I drop small doses of ink on the skin; it starts infiltrating the pores, the wrinkles and cracks. This graphic approach cannot be dissociated from organic secretions. I explore the body through its cracks as if I would draw from the inside of the skin itself in order to reveal a hidden interiority. In Orientations, ink is used to produce images. I walk through Tunis, holding a glass filled with black ink in my hand, and shoot, the camera directed at the reflecting surface. As soon as you focus on it, the surface of ink becomes a screen that is capable of receiving images. To focus on this glass is already a way of framing, of filming; and filming this black lentil leads to a reflection on the act of seeing itself. I am also interested in the way the inky surface allows the video images to vibrate and the way the gaze, as well as the camera, tries to find the right distance between the material and the surrounding landscapes. Any orientation seems useless in this attempt at permanent accommodation.

SS : Besides ink, the motif of thread is frequently used in your videos, such as in Coulée douce (2007), Dénouement (2011) and your latest video Attraction (2011). What interests you about this element?

IB : What touches me about thread is its disposition of contact. It ties and connects and with such tenuousness! Handling a thread is a simple gesture that can somehow become extreme. It can carry a real suspense because it touches the void.And I like the way a thread can be folded, how it approximates the hollow of things, the way it embraces and cuts the air when it knots. When you handle a thread, it allows you to understand what surrounds us, with fineness. In Dénouement one sees a stretched thread that surveys and embraces the void of a snowy landscape. In Attraction, the thread takes on the fold of a ray of sunlight in a totally dark room. It outlines the light. By crossing the luminous ray, the thread becomes the source, the spark that allows us to see. In these two videos, the thread indicates the limits of the zone of appearance. As soon as it disappears, the spatial marks lose their way in the immensity of the landscape or in the opacity of darkness.

SS : Your work is characterized by a rigorous approach and formal structure that contrasts with a certain 'letting go' and poetic escapes.

IB : That's true and I would like to jump back to the thread: what also touches me about this object is the fact that it is precise and flexible at the same time. It incarnates an ambiguity that I like to examine in my artistic research, that of a sharp delicacy or a floating precision. It is really this duality that I am interested in: I try to frame the floating, to confer a structure to volatile, intangible or at least fragile matters, but always searching for the right balance.

SS : Do you have a specific working method? Can you describe the way you work?

IB : My work develops slowly and on a long-term basis. I often start by gravitating towards intuitions and observations of diverse small phenomena that I write down in my notebooks. I try then, over several months, to refine these first drafts in order to find the right framework to develop them. This deployment implicates several activities: I experiment with the material, of course, but also read a lot. All kinds of reading can function as a stimulator. Attraction, for example, was nourished by texts on the philosophy of atomism by Lucretius, or writings on the art of mime. Stimulation does not necessarily come through studying or the accumulation of knowledge. A network of words or even a misunderstood notion can serve as an initiation.

SS : How do you situate yourself within the contemporary art market and in regards to the Arab world

IB : My research is light and not very expensive. I need very few things to work, which allows me to be quite independent and even if I am part of the art market, I have preserved a considerable margin of liberty. Regarding my position in relation to the Arab world, I am of course very concerned about what happens in Tunisia. I live in Paris but many of my thoughts go there. And this is quite difficult to explain, but every time I go there, I feel an urgent necessity to work. At the moment, I am trying to participate in some artistic projects there and I am happy with the fact that Lowave will screen some of their programs during the opening of the B'chira Art Center, which is taking place in November in Sidi Thabet, near Tunis. The direct contact with art works is still missing there; especially in the field of video art, it's very rare. We have to stimulate possible exchanges beyond the borders that are increasingly closed in Europe and especially France. This might be considered as a modest, yet existing, form of resistance. By the way, I would like to ask you a question too: how did you come up with the idea of the Resistance[s] collection and why did you choose this title?