Fakhri El Ghezal Akouda, b. 1981

Born in 1981 in Akouda (Tunisia), Fakhri El Ghezal is a Tunisian visual artist and independent filmmaker, whose practice includes silver photography, video, painting, drawing and calligraphy, as well as hybridizations between these mediums. Between 2008 and 2021, he was a pyrography painter under the pseudonym "Ibrahim Màtouss". From 2016, he practiced calligraphy and tag under the pseudonym [Weld Hlima].

 

In El Ghezal's work, "it is always about light, about manifestation by light and in light," writes Moroccan author and philosopher Arafat Sadallah. that appears through different sets of buried memory, resolved traces and the revealed ones. The light that emerges from pathways of the buried memory, from traces that have gone and returned. In his essay "Traces, the photographic work of Fakhri El Ghezal (2012)", Ismaël writes "Photography makes the body of the one who makes it, in a perpetual resonance, in an incessant back and forth between the memory of the flesh and the flesh of the image. The images are also evanescent traces on the surface of the photograph. Faces and images. Bodies and photographs. There are the two poles which Fakhri El Ghezal's photographic work is revolving around obsessively. In a slow and lengthy movement of a pick that rises in the air and then plunges into the earth. Year after year. The same dual gestures of sowing through the wound. Then, the fertile patience of allowing time for the fruit to appear slowly. And harvest it. Each time the same. Each time different. Going back and forth. Faces and images. Bodies and photographs. Black and white. Political and intimate. Fiction and documentary. The self and the other."

 

Fakhri El Ghezal graduated from the Institut Supérieur des Beaux-arts of Tunis and from the Institut des Beaux-Arts of Nabeul. His work has been presented in numerous international festivals, fairs and exhibitions, including the Rencontre africaines de la photographie (African Photography Encounters) in Bamako, the Documenta Fifteen in Kassel, the New Museum in New York, the MUCEM in Marseille and the Centre d'Art Vivant (Center for Living Arts) in Tunis. He has also participated in the Carthage Film Festival in Tunisia, the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland, and the Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Festival in France.