HASSAN HAJJAJ
TACAPAE X HAJJAJ HASSAN IN THE OLIVE GROVE OF TEMOULA
Gabès Cinéma Fen – 7th Edition
Somewhere between a harvest and a happening, a studio and a field, Hassan Hajjaj’s latest body of work unfolds not in a white cube, but beneath olive branches, on the soil of Temoula — a living landscape at the edge of Gabès.
Here, in the midst of the first Tacapae olive harvest, Hajjaj set up an open-air studio where portraits emerged as much from encounters as from intention.
This exhibition, part of the 7th edition of Gabès Cinema Fen, is the result of an invitation by Tacapae, an art and olive oil initiative founded by Franco-Tunisian calligraffiti artist eL Seed.
Anchored in long-term thinking around land, art, and culture, Tacapae’s collaboration with Hajjaj brought together farmers, artists, and cultural workers for a weekend that defied conventional borders — between disciplines, between rituals, between the local and the transnational.
Hajjaj’s presence in Gabès wasn’t simply that of an invited guest.
It was that of a witness and an amplifier.
His portraits — composed, staged, assembled — hold the aesthetic friction that defines his entire practice. Working at the intersection of image-making, fashion, object design, and installation, Hajjaj constructs frames that are both visual and political.
In Temoula, these frames held the faces of those who shape the land- the hands, the postures, the styles.
Everyday objects — repurposed, reframed — become narrative devices.
A studio built under trees becomes a place where memory and imagination collapse into a single scene.
Long before this project, Hajjaj had already dismantled the hierarchies of global culture.
Born in Larache and living between London and Marrakech, his work breaks from any singular definition of heritage or modernity.
In his world, a caftan can meet a branded hoodie without irony.
A soft drink wrapper can become a frame.
The portrait, usually a tool of fixed identity, becomes in his hands an unstable terrain — one where subjectivity is claimed, performed, and reassembled.
This exhibition is less a presentation of finished works than a proposition- that art can emerge from collective rhythms, that the land is not a backdrop but a collaborator, and that representation is always a negotiation.
Through his lens, Hajjaj doesn’t offer answers, but instead composes a field of possibilities — one where joy and critique, tradition and disruption, coexist in every frame.
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