Artists in residence

Kaouther Ben Hania, a Tunisian director, studied cinema in Tunis (EDAC) and in Paris (Fémis and Sorbonne-Nouvelle Paris 3 University).

She has directed several short films including Peau de Colle/ Wooden Hand (2013), which has been selected in several international festivals and has won several awards (Tanit d’or at the Carthage Film Festival, Audience Award – CINEMED Montpellier 2013, Audience Award – Leiden International Short Film Festival (Netherlands).

Her documentary Les Imams vont à l’école/ Imams Go to School has been unveiled at IDFA 2010 in official competition.

Le Challat de Tunis/ Challat of Tunis, her first feature film, opened the ACID section of the Cannes Film Festival in 2014 and has been an international success both in festivals and cinemas.

She then directed ZAINEB N’AIME PAS LA NEIGE/ Zaineb Hates the snow, a feature-length documentary film shot over a period of six years between Tunisia and Canada, which has been revealed in 2016 in the official selection at the Locarno International Film Festival. It has subsequently won the TANIT D’OR at the Carthage Film Festival, the BEST DOC prize at the CINEMED festival in Montpellier…

Her film LA BELLE EST LA MEUTE/Beauty and the Dogs has been selected in official competition at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival in the UN CERTAIN REGARD category, where it has won the prize for best sound creation. This film has been distributed in a dozen countries.

Her latest film The Man Who Sold His Skin/L’homme qui a vendu sa peau, selected at the 2020 Venice Film Festival (Best Actor Award) is nominated for the Oscar for “Best International Film” at the 93rd Academy Awards in 2021.

Younès Ben Slimane is a Tunisian artist, filmmaker and architect. In 2020, he joined Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains. His training as an architect has a major influence on his approach as an artist. Working through film, video, drawing and installation, he establishes a permanent dialogue between architecture and visual arts, where different mediums coexist and reflect their respective potentialities and limits.

He has participated in contemporary art events including Jaou Tunis (TN) and Documenta fifteen (DE). His work has been shown at the Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles in Paris (FR), Selma Feriani Gallery in Sidi Bou Saïd (TN), Mucem in Marseille (FR) and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Skopje (MK). His films have been selected in international festivals including Locarno Film Festival, CPH:DOX and DokuFest. In 2021, he received the Studio Collector Award.

Hakim Abel Ben Youcef (Hakeem b) lives and works in Paris and Lyon since 2009. After graduating from the École Nationale Supérieure de Dijon and the Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains (Sartre/Beauvoir-élève class of the Japanese artist Ryoji Ikeda), he won several international prizes in digital arts and joined renowned residencies such as the Casa de Velázquez in Madrid, the Cité internationale des arts in Paris or the Künstlerhaus Schloss Balmoral in Bad-Ems.

His research focuses mainly on digital creation tools. Video, whether it is performance, installation or simple monstration, invests different territories of reflection.

The work presented on this page (HAB P006) prefigures the passage of our societies from a material world to the world of dematerialization. It is a work that the artist has been carrying out since the early 2000s by combining two philosophical and theoretical territories with the notions of impotence, failure and fall. It is a research inscribed in the space-time of the contemporary world. Aesthetically, the pieces combine 2d animation, 3d animation, recovery of materials filmed or not on social networks (YouTube…), programming, digital drawing and musical compositions. An interconnection of disciplines feeds its visual language: namely a logic of co-construction of visual matter. (A perpetual reconstruction of the material produced. The latter becomes the material which itself becomes a new matter for reflection and creation). For the artist nothing is lost because nothing is finished.

His works are exhibited mainly in venues such as the Grand Palais and Petit Palais in Paris, the Chelsea Art Museum in New York City, the Redbrick Art Center in Yokohama, the Bibliotheca in Alexandria, the Malba Foundation in Buenos Aires, the MNAM in Paris (…) he has been represented by galleries such as Schirman & de Beaucé (Paris), c5collecciòn (Santiago de Compostela) and Gad Gallery (Oslo).

Hakim Abel Ben Youcef · Mü

“Mü is built according to a specific musical creation protocol. It takes its source in a photograph (a cloudy sky) taken last August 16th. Between grayscale, programming, graphic design, the composition is inserted in the field of digital works. Graphic and sound composition for two instruments (Noé Nillni : Double bell trumpet and Paul Müller Reyes : Modular Synthesizer), the aerial and textured sound explores the fine particles of this cloudy sky; the clouds obey the stars; they heckle them, couple them, excite them, in a score in 3 times. As defined by Aristotle on the first causes of any motor movement: All things are moved by another.”

– Hakim Abel Ben Youcef, 2021