A TASTE OF TUNISIAN FINE ART

TOWARDS A CONTEMPORARY ARAB ART
During the 1970's, Arab visual artists recognized the need to join forces in order to establish an inter-Arab domain of creation and artistic exploration through cultural conferences and group exhibitions. Shared questions concerning the role of the visual arts in the future of Arab culture, and the contradictions and tensions stemming from historical circumstances, led artists to organize activities of this kind.

Thus, in 1971 the first congress of visual arts in the Arab world, held in Damascus, met this need for pan-Arab co-operation. A year later, in April 1972, the Al-Wassiti Festival in Baghdad brought creative artists from many countries face to face. The same year, at Hammamet in Tunisia, a colloquium was held on contemporary styles in Arab visual arts. These activities led to the first pan-Arab Biennial of visual arts in Baghdad in 1974, followed by a second one in Rabat in 1976. These successive activities, which brought together artists and art critics from the Middle East and North Africa, providing them with the opportunity to exchange and confront individual and collective experiences accumulated over the years, served to create bonds, and to nurture the reciprocal exchange of currents and influences, both stylistic and conceptual.

Amid the diversity of inspiration during this period, it was the sense that Arab artists shared a common destiny which led to a real awakening of consciousness. Since then, there has been a certain relapse, which has not however prevented artists from getting together to participate in a concerted way in inter-Arab activities such as the Asilah Cultural Festival, the annual Kuwaiti exhibition of Arab artists, and the biennials of Cairo and Sharjah, etc. TOWARDS A

CULTURAL MODERNIZATION
The development crisis faced by Arab countries today originated in the unequal assimilation of modern products and values. The exhausted state of many modernizing industrial projects in certain developing countries demonstrates the limitations of strategies designed in economic terms, with little attention paid to cultural matters. The true and comprehensive modernization of a society must go by way of the modernization of the culture.

However, the lure of a cultural and artistic renewal, held out so temptingly at the onset of independence, and strongly marked by legitimate questions concerning cultural identity (and in the seventies by collective inter-Arab research), has been called into question by those who would seek their identity in traditional values. The problem for the Arab world lies in finding an appropriate response to this dilemma, and not foundering on a stubborn rejection of "the Other." Witness the generation of the 80's, which replaced attempts at collective effort with various individual itineraries and the multiplication of artistic exchanges and confrontations.
Though the infrastructures related to cultural life may be lacking, imagination and diverse private initiatives are alive and well. Rather than attempting a general survey of the state of contemporary Arab art, we should emphasize its creative power and its effectiveness as a tool of social transformation.

AESTHETIC RESPONSES
It is in this general context that contemporary Arab art evolved. It would be difficult to give an inventory of all the approaches taken up by artist since the 1950's. Among the principal trends which seek to provide aesthetic responses to the problems posed by the visual arts, several options can be distinguished which co-exist and inter-relate.

FORMS OF FIGURATIVE ART
Modes of figurative representation are many and diverse. They vary according to their terms of reference and their sources of inspiration. One tendency draws its motifs and themes from social life. It refers, more or less allusively, to lived reality. There are many artists, Palestinians and others, who give prominence to scenes and types taken from social life and historical events by means of figurative signs capable of drawing attention simultaneously to the realities of the world and to their symbolic representation.

THE SCHOOL OF THE SIGN
Deeply aware of calligraphy as they are, Arab painters have sought some form of specific plastic expression by synthesizing traditional and modern forms. This quest, which has allowed them to establish a dialogue between the specific and the universal, delves into the primal sources of calligraphy and the symbolic signs of popular art. Arabic calligraphy, with its aesthetic, semantic, and philosophic - mystical dimensions, has led many painters to make the Arabic alphabet the object of artistic exploration.

Traditional signs and symbols have also attracted the attention of several artists who see this legacy as an important source of inspiration. In their artistic activity, they investigate, in varying degrees, the formal elements and the symbolic dimensions of this inheritance. Certain North African artist, for example, mine traditional Berber art for signs which they might use as structural elements in their works, amplifying some and reinventing others