BIO Hédy Gobaa grew up in Tunisia and studied visual art at the École Européenne Supérieure de l’Image (ÉESI) in France. Back in Tunisia, he exhibited his work in numerous galleries from 2007 to 2010, when the “Arab Spring” began. In 2013 he relocated to Montreal, where he obtained a doctorate arts studies and practices at the Université du Québec à Montréal. In his work, the materiality of the paint has become an increasingly vital question.
ARTISTIC PRACTICE Hédy Gobaa’s work is based on a duality contrasting East and West, in which two ways of being in the world, two kinds of knowledge, are pitched against one another by virtue of different technical devices and discourses. He is interested in Tunisia as an archetype of formerly colonised developing countries whose political life is in ferment. What can it teach us? What secrets will it reveal to us? His painting is thus rooted in a political context without this, however, being made its topic.
PROJECT Hédy Gobaa’s project is entitled Lorsqu’ici devient là-bas. In today’s globalised world and as a migrant himself, Gobaa feels that what eludes us today is a sense of place. Who among us can still claim to having remained faithful to the place where we grew up? Using a computer to prefabricate his paintings, Gobaa will create hybrid landscapes from those of Tunisia and Quebec using superimposition, the incorporation of elements, cut-outs and manipulated shapes and colours. He would like to express the fact that the way of looking of the interconnected traveller who inhabits several places is hybrid; that these travellers superimpose snapshots one on top of the other; and that they accumulate these snapshots, erase things and create a kind of monstrous deformation.
