Effet de serre

 

Effet de serre is a research (2012), exhibition (2021) and publication (2022) project, in which the artist Farah Khelil is committed to renovating the municipal greenhouse of the city of Tunis at Parc du Belvedere with an artistic production grant. His approach questions the definition of the art object and the exhibition as well as the place of the artist in cultural institutions. Thus, the artist emancipates himself from the demands of the market by directing a scholarship to support artistic production towards actions of general interest and common good. Then, the greenhouse hosts an immersive display composed of polymorphic and heterogeneous elements that retrace the architectural history of the Palmarium of Tunis in a dialectic between eucalyptus and palm, tradition and postcolonial modernity.
The ontological questions of the image and the exhibition highlight a dualistic and dichotomous system of thought that separates Nature and Culture, Self and Other, Subject and Object. They allow a formal translation of the relationship that art history has with the material, institutional and cultural conditions of the construction of images as a surface effect. Theatres, gardens, bestiaries, museums and greenhouses thus appear to be appropriate models of study suitable for mapping out a critique of the conception of the image and its exhibition as it was inherited from Europe. Richly documented, Effet de Serre brings together previously unpublished essays by Clelia Coussonnet, Adnen Jdey, Hedi Khelil and Farah Khelil. This publication accompanies and furthers the eponymous research and exhibition project conceived by Farah Khelil in October 2021 in the municipal greenhouse of the Jardin des plantes of the Belvédère in Tunis. It unveils a corpus of works and texts produced within the framework of this project, which is based on a study of the history of the Palmarium of Tunis as well as on the dialectic of the palm tree and the eucalyptus.