Archive de banalités tunisoises
"L'épreuve du dehors", 2008
"Archeology of the Visual 'Contemporaneity'", 2008


Installations
"under standing over views", 2009
"Two Paintings and a Book", 2008
"Give a name to your boat", 2008
—, french version


Approach, french
—, english

Studies
Skins, french, 2007
—, german, 2007

PDF

The art of Nadia Kaabi Linke is related to places and their histories, it is as time-specific as site-specific. The installations and objects as well as her pictorial works are anchored in constellations of cultural and historical, social and political contexts and refer to a certain place or coincidental events. As it is often embedded in urban fields her work is also intertwined with socio-psychological topics: the structure of perception, memory, and geographically and politically constructed identities. Her work enunciates the interlocking of public and personal issues and reveals the embodiment of time in our experiences by retracing the recent past. One could say her production is all about manufacturing strangeness in what we usually consider as ordinary.
She smartly makes use of all kind of media and artefacts, symbolisms and codes, which are circulating in everyday-life. As it deals with elements of popular culture one could see Nadia Kaabi Linke’s approach in a traditional proximity to Pop-Art or classical site-specific art. For sure, these movements, which are not that familiar to each other, inspired her methods. Nevertheless her artworks distinguishes from these forms because of a highly conceptual use of materials and objects and a certain performative force, which is generated by her active and constructive use of disturbing contradictions. Her principle seems to be bringing together beauty and violence, refinement and brutality, sublimity and vulgarism.
Perhaps there is just one sentence which could precisely describe the very reason of Nadia Kaabi Linke’s critical endeavour, it is Walter Benjamin’s epitaph: There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism. The truth of this statement can be as shocking as clandestine, as cruel as sleeky and sometimes it is as funny as it is serious. We can see it in Nadia Kaabi Linke’s work.

Berlin, January 31, 2010
TKL