Mu'awiya's Thread

Collective exhibition curated by Nadine Atallah featuring the artists: Marwan Elgamal, Randa Mirza, Joëlle de La Casinière, Gouider Triki, Souhir El Amine, Abdoulaye Konaté, Amel Bennys, Jan Kopp, Huda Lutfi, Intissar Belaïd, Emmanuelle Andrianjafy, Nadia Kaabi-Linke, Lina Ben Rejeb, Siryne Eloued, Ngozi-Omeje Ezema, Doa Aly, Wiame Haddad, Dorothy Iannone, Sarah Pucci, Slavs and Tatars, Yazan Khalili and Lara Khaldi.

“If there were only one thread between me and the people, it will never break. If they stretch it, I loosen it, and if they loosen it, I stretch it.” This saying is traditionally attributed to the caliph Muʿawiya, a major figure of the first Fitna, a period of successive wars from which he emerged victorious in 661. An elegy for volatile equilibrium, the metaphor suggests that stability is not the antidote to crisis. How, then, are we to navigate these boiling forces? What happens if the thread breaks?

Muʿawiya’s Thread is an exhibition interested in the ways in which we make sense of tumultuous times. To that end, it delves into the imaginaries conjured by the word fitna, which traditionally refers to political crises in early Islam. Fitna also manifests as the turmoil of love, just as it does in the social body at large. Using this analogy, this exhibition calls for embracing the desynchronized expressions of liberty.

Tunisian historian Hichem Djaït’s (1935-2021) book La Grande Discorde [The Great Discord] (1989) provided a conceptual framework for the exhibition. The Ring of the Dove, a treatise on love written by the poet Ibn Hazm in the 11th century, helped elucidate the resonances between disorder in politics and disorder in love. The works on display — many of which emerge from residencies at 32Bis — are the fruits of a reflection shared with some twenty artists from Tunisia and beyond.