PARIS
12 JUNE TO 2 AUGUST
Born in Gabes in 1983, Malek Gnaoui lives and works in Tunis. His work explores issues related to social conditions and offers an engaged reflection on the current sociopolitical context in Tunisia. Through video, ceramics, printmaking, installation, sound, and performance, his approach to materiality leads him to develop a practice involving everyday materials and traditional techniques.
Following his creative residency at the Cité internationale des arts in Paris, the artist Malek Gnaoui presents his exhibition Curva in the Parisian space of Fondation H, until August 2, 2025.
Curva, written by Kenza Jemmali, June 2025
Emanating from discussions, perhaps with a touch of philosophy-criticism, which never hurts, does it? this text meanders through a new body of work that constitutes, at its heart, a continuity for Malek Gnaoui. A look back over the years that have shaped him, and the awakening of something new - perhaps an ignition. This text is stitched together from notes taken from discussions, spatial experiences and sustained reflection. A voice -mine, if I may say-so -that seeks not to define, but to trace the contours of an essence.
Curva, a lively current exploration by Malek Gnaoui, unfolds as an affective study of collective identity and its fragile intercurrences. It draws on ultras culture, the radical and often misunderstood world of football supporters, and transcends its immediate references to fan culture to reflect on wider rituals of belonging, resistance and shared memory.
Developed during and beyond the artist's residency at Fondation H, the exhibition takes shape from its context - the surroundings, the building sites, the architecture and the artist's encounters with local and international ultras. In them, he recognises a shared ethos that transcends geography. Ultras everywhere carry with them similar codes, rituals and tensions. The exhibition fuses these revelations with stories rooted in the artist's practice - a practice through which Gnaoui has always explored the act of repurposing, using various techniques to appreciate their infinite complexity and symbolic significance.
As always with Gnaoui, exploring the socio-political, the material becomes metaphor, and his gestures, precise but open, leave room for reverberation. In Curva, his investigation extends both inwards and outwards. Having long examined how individuals internalise and resist systems of control, his focus is now on the collective. He turns to the ultras, not simply as football fans, but as embodiments of a charged social condition. Through their radical presence, choreographed rituals and fierce loyalty, they become a lens through which to explore the tensions between autonomy and cohesion, vulnerability and strength.
The curva, that curved space where the ultras gather and their voices rise in unison, transcends its architecture,emerging not just as a place, but as a metaphor for cohesion and contradiction, devotion and the performative nature of belonging.
Staged over the two levels of Fondation H, the exhibition unfolds like a ritual. Not linear, but rhythmic. Not a narrative, but a structure of signs, symbols and sensations. Gnaoui does not render the culture of the ultras as a spectacle; he studies what sustains it: repetition, cryptic language, mutual recognition and the creation of myths through presence.
The exhibition opens in tonal and conceptual darkness. Curva's visual language is dominated by black-on-black compositions that resist the seductive clarity - and here specifically - the division of colour. This restraint alludes to the artist's very first residence in Paris, when he was discovering the city, its art scene and his own practice.
A red light pierces the space, not in opposition, but like a vital pulse. It penetrates the space, activating the black walls and keeping them in tension. In this restricted palette, colour becomes a unifying force; black, a symbol of anonymity, is not a void but a volume, binding without declaring, containing multiplicity within itself and forging a shared identity through difference.
A layer of sound envelops the space, an immersive recording of a match - in this case, a live encounter. The songs, voices, rumbling drums and rhythmic hand-clapping immerse us in the relentless momentum of the game -and the exhibition. It's not background music, it's not atmosphere. It's a structure. A pulse. The voices rise like a liturgy; adrenalin becomes a rite. The songs resonate not as noise, but as architecture. The space - like the stadium - becomes a place of projection, communion and fracture.
Flags hang, gently undulating. Compositions of translucent fabric and superimposed flex, they carry what may appear to been crypted codes or fragments of ultras' slogans. Not chosen at random, but for their resonance in our urban lives-symbols, phrases, landmarks that we already carry within us. Reassembled, they are superimposed. The result is an echo of charged gestures - reminiscent of those deployed by the ultras. Mantras and provocations, veiled in black textures, emblematic of a language understood but rarely expressed aloud.
A modelled plaster bust rises up, evoking both classical statuary and the roughness of urban debris. Through this sculpture, Gnaoui inscribes a gesture of marking -the passage of the ultras from the street to the stadium, a territory that is transported and transformed. This figure does not represent an individual but a group: the ultras. Gathering scattered fragments of walls into a new form, the artist evokes the concept of creating a collective body in memory. Placed on a reinvented pedestal - an echo of football culture and its supporters. Not a glorification, but a presence made tangible: a monument to the absence of a monument.
A series of five panels presents a portrait that gradually emerges. Printed on transparent glass, slightly obscured by a smoke-like haze, it reveals itself as the angle of view shifts. The smoke dissipates and the hooded face takes shape. The metal frames are reminiscent of Gothic windows; the misty transparency is reminiscent of stained glass. But here there is no divine figure, no story being told -one portrait representing many. The work follows a sequential narrative, like a frame-by-frame animation, where the image vacillates between presence and absence. A representation drawn, deliberately or otherwise, from the language of cinema.
The hands, a recurring element in Gnaoui's work, reappear in a singular form. Not as isolated iconography, but as a conduit. Seized in a closed fist, the hand communicates before words. It holds a green laser that cuts through the air, reminiscent of those brandished in stadiums to signal, accuse and direct. It doesn't illuminate, it intensifies. The hand does not protest or resist in any obvious way - although it contains the possibility of doing so. It offers an encoded memory, a signal, an intimate act of address.
What binds these elements together is Gnaoui's material intelligence. Known for his sculptural sensibility, he works at the threshold of touch and sense. Plaster, metal, glass, textiles, sound and lightare not chosen for their aesthetic appeal alone, but for their capacity to carry memory, to trace gesture, to contain time. His forms are not replicas, but distillations. There is a tactile spirituality at play, which turns moulding and composition into means of knowledge. He creates not for mere glory, but for the everyday gestures of unity, protest and survival.
Curva evolves in a fragile terrain: cohesion and rupture, concealment and exposure, control and chaos. Within the strict codes of ultras culture, Gnaoui finds tenderness. In their rituals, a desire for permanence. These contradictions are not resolved, but kept in tension, in balance, in truth -at least for the time being.
The exhibition does not seek to explain. It is neither an ethnography of fanaticism nor nostalgia. It is an invitation to stay with what is coded, collective and sacred. A meditation on the dynamics of belonging and the textures of shared time. Gnaoui invites us to feel how identity pulses through rhythm, how it fractures, and how it might be reimagined.
Not through spectacle, but through symbolism.
Not with big, loud gestures, but with intense, silent gestures.
At a time when individualism is commodified, Curva reminds us, viscerally and magnificently, of the cost and wonder of belonging to something greater than oneself, leaving a question that resonates beyond the space: Che siamo noi?
Coral Resistance 1 , written by Ana Vaz, June 2025
che siamo noi?
- AC Milan ultras
at the top of the stands - a round cage made of reinforced concrete, as round and orbital as the Earth - achoreography of bodies, colours and names was formed, deformed and an ephemeral design emerged: a mosaic inexplicable to the eyes of the humans, already so little human, who were trying to decipher the meaning of the apparition. the mirage gradually revealed itself like the skin of a chameleon camouflaging itself in the middle of the forest, changing from green to brown, from orange to neon.
the match that day was between two groups of men who looked like tiny ants in an aquarium compared to the huge bodies of fabric, smoke, light, colour and song that filled the continuous circle of the stands - a perfect curve, an earthly curve, a social curve.
curva is a form that resists
the tyranny of the straight line
there is no straight line in the world
there is only its imposition
the sports arena was called Maracanã 2 in the indigenous language, a Tupi-Guarani name meaning ‘like a rattle’ - from “maraca” (rattle) + ‘nã’ (like, similar or equal). This name was given by the indigenous people of the region to the maracanã-guaçu parrots that inhabited the area around the current stadium in the 1500s and sang like the maracanã.
in 1500, every European settler who arrived on the coast of what is now Brazil took a maracanã with them, amazed by the bird's ability to learn, reproduce and distort the language of humans.
curiously, the maraca is the main spiritual instrument of the indigenous world; it is the stirring of the maraca's seeds that animates and links times and dimensions. It's no coincidence that, more than 500 years later, the world's most acclaimed football stadium still bears the name of this rattling bird.
curva is an interruption
interferes with the rectilinear concept
which believes that time is linear
when infact it is circular
meanders
night fell and the game continued to be fierce. the supporters raised evanescent messages that changed with the rhythm of the game. this portion of humanity present there made the reinforced concrete cage tremble, so much so that it seemed to be made of glass. the humanity gathered together untimely weakened the imposing monument: the concrete became glass blown by the song of the humans.
however, some of humanity saw the apparition without understanding its meaning: a walrus indecipherable to theire yes, which had already forgotten the time when they were human, when they were animals, where they were. It was a people who had moved away from the ground. A type of people who had inexplicably arisen from the efforts of another people to reduce the Earth to an abstract space, empty and dead.
yet despite the Herculean efforts of this Humanity to annihilate this other Humanity, there remained a type of people clinging to the ground, a type of people who seemed to vibrate to the rhythm of the stands, the earthquakes, the tsunamis, the cyclones. it was a people who were no longer Human because they had understood that Humanity was no place for them.
strangely enough, this tiny humanity, clinging to the ground, was a people who suffered far more from the earthquakes, cyclones, storms and barbarities of the great Humanity, but who insisted, by will, destiny or mystery, on clinging to the vibration of the stands, to the insect smell of friendly bodies, to the childish and resolute hymn that vibrated inside the concrete cage. these people were still able to quickly decipher the miracle messages from the stands. after all, they were part of it.
thestadium is a
architecture for reverberation
to amplify the voice
it's a wave amplifier
the stadium is curva
the arena has become a nest of free radicals consumed by the fever of faith, the fever that stuns the secular state, the fever that transcends borders, the fever that connects peoples, the fever.
that day, the show was next to the show: multicoloured electrons tormenting any tyranny of order or authority. they moved like prophetic constellations pointing the way to a world still totally unknown to humanity today.
curva is not a scenario
or a concept
or a set
it is lived
This Humanity with a capital H came from a people who suffered from fear, who were hostages to their own vanity and the pure desire to Have rather than to Be. they spent whole days in front of a lithium mirror that reflected them perfectly. they only knew how to look at themselves, bewitched by the mirrors. They couldn't even read the banners and rags on the stands. So the police of capital Humanity decided to ban banners and rags from the world's stands, because the indecipherable is always a threat. it was like closing the mouth of the marakanã bird. yet,
he willnever stop singing.
today, they have disappeared from the area around the stadium, where as they were so present in the 16th and 17th centuries, the maracanãs were forced by theft, necessity or smuggling to a massive immigration to the old continent. Today, they can be found in the skies over Europe's major capitals, disturbing the age-old peace of the cities. Maracanãs never stop singing, after all, to Be is to always keep an ‘open channel of communication’ 3.
in the forests
savannahs
and cities of the bent world,
have always risen
will always rise
those who know
the tribal spirit
which has been taken from us
but which persists in some
corners of the planet
not by mistake
called
earth
in all the arenas of the small humanity of the planet - it exists well beyond the nation-state - we can see the most powerful messages, mirages and choreographies of our recent history: green, red and white flags, sometimes with maps, faces and mosques that perfectly outline the desire of this small humanity to become. a humanity that fights for the most radical belonging to the earth: the original definition of the word human, the one that comes from humus.
it's an insurgent humanity that no longer believes in the arena, the country or the city; it believes only in the blind and perfect solidarity that sustains life. It spends the day pretending to cooperate with Humanity and, when night falls, it puts on its uniform - an animal skin that reorganises perspective - and surrenders itself to the collective, hallucinatory fever of the curve, to the love of the mirage that only tiny humans can still understand.
1 Organised supporters of the Ferroviário Atlético Clube de Fortaleza (Ceará, Brazil). The team was founded in 1933 by railway workers who inevitably spent their evenings working in the workshops, maintaining wagons, locomotives and carriages. Thus was born a team historically linked to social struggles and supported by an openly anti-machist, anti-fascist and anti-capitalist fan base.
2 A football stadium in the northern part of Rio de Janeiro, it is considered to be one of the biggest stadiums in the world and the scene of some of the greatest moments in the history of South American and world football.
3 I am very grateful to my key ally, the researcher and artist Nuno da Luz, who, in his quest to discover the violence of his continent, has found in the Marakanã bird a way of thinking about a politics of sound and listening as a methodology for emancipation. His current thesis, "Ecologies of Noise: Aurality, Awareness and Environmental Resonance", promises to send indecipherable messages to human ears.
BIOGRAPHY OF MALEK GNAOUI
Born in 1983 in Gabes, Tunisia, Malek Gnaoui lives and works in Tunis. He graduated in 2007 from the School of Art and Decoration of Tunis and trained in the art of ceramics at the National Center for Ceramic Arts - Sidi Kacem Jellizi in Tunis, Tunisia.
Malek Gnaoui's work explores themes related to social conditions and the concept of human sacrifice. Through video, ceramics, engraving, installation, sound, and performance, his approach to materiality leads him to develop a practice that integrates everyday materials and traditional techniques. His alternative and hybrid approach transcends the utilitarian confines of ceramics to create unexpected and singular atmospheres.
Anchored in materiality, his work broadly reflects an engaged dialogue within Tunisia's current sociopolitical context.
During his internship at the National Center for Ceramic Arts, located in the mausoleum of Sidi Kacem Jellizi, while observing worshippers offering sheep as sacrifices,he developed a reflection on the symbolism of sacrificial acts. Since 2011, his work has revolved around recurring themes and symbols embodying the dualities of life and death, past and present. By employing a wide range of media, Malek Gnaoui immerses himself into the concept of spirituality, exploring civilizations from ancient times to the contemporary era. His exploration of bodies, elements, and materials underscores the physical involvement in the creation of his works, which often exude a performative dimension.
A prominent figure in Tunisia's contemporary art scene, Malek Gnaoui gained international recognition through Politiques, a collective he co-founded with other artists in 2011. Represented by the Tunisian Selma Feriani Gallery, he has recently presented ambitious projects at Salon d’Octobre in Belgrade, Serbia, and the KANAL Centre Pompidou in Brussels, Belgium, in 2024, as well as at the Dom Museum in Vienna, Austria, in 2021, and the Sharjah Biennial in the United Arab Emirates.
His work is also part of prestigious collections, including Fondation H in Antananarivo, Madagascar, the Dom Museum in Vienna, Austria, and both the Victoria and Albert Museum and the British Museum in London, United Kingdom.