The Good Seven Years Book Launch with Rafram Chaddad and Lina Lazaar

Join us on Thursday, March 14 for the launch of The Good Seven Years! The evening includes a performance by Rafram Chaddad—a cross between an art auction house and a fish market in Djerba—live-bidding (cash only) in front of the audience for a string of five dried fish from Tunisia. The launch also features a conversation with Chaddad and curator Lina Lazaar.

The Good Seven Years combines visual art works and research on Jewish Tunisia with texts related to the work and contemporary visual insights into an ancient Jewish community in the Arab world. The book discusses unwritten traditions, visual research through food, synagogues, and Jewish-Tunisian language and everyday life as reflected in the last seven years the artist spent in Tunisia, and includes an essay by Yigal S. Nizri that delves into the history of Chaddad's family and the broader context of his artistic endeavors.

The Good Seven Years is an edition of 400

Signed and numbered

Born on Djerba, an island off the coast of southern Tunisia, Rafram Chaddad (b. 1976) is an artist whose photographs, films, and multi-media installations rethink the archive, migration narratives, and what it means to belong. Based in Tunis, Rafram’s work reflects on his personal life experiences and comments on broader socio-political issues including food, migration and displacement, identity and belonging. Over the past twenty years, he's made dozens of short films and installations that have been exhibited worldwide in cultural institutions, galleries and museums, including Art in the Tunnel, Düsseldorf; Kayu Lucie Fontaine Gallery, Bali; Halle 14, Leipzig; Chaddad has had solo exhibitions at the Mucem Museum in Marseille, the Maximilian Forum in Munich and the B7L9 in Tunis.

Lina Lazaar serves as the Vice President of the Kamel Lazaar Foundation (KLF), a position she has held since 2015. The KLF is dedicated to promoting the Arts and Culture from the MENA region. Lina has shaped the focus of the KLF collection and initiated the now biennial Jaou Festival, the first edition of which took place in 2013. Previously, she worked as a Contemporary Art specialist at Sotheby's, London. Throughout her decade long career, she spearheaded the emergence of the contemporary Arab art market on the international scene, and also worked as an independent curator. Following her curation of the first pan-Arab exhibition The Future of a Promise at the 54th Biennale de Venezia in 2011, she made possible the return of Tunisia in 2017 after an almost 6 decade pause with 'The Absence of Paths.' Lina is the co-founder of Ibraaz, a prominent online platform on visual arts from the ME, and the instigator of B7L9, the first independent & experimental art space in Tunis, both of which served as parts of KLF. Lina is a graduate from HEC Lausanne, and holds graduate degrees from London School of Economics and Sotheby's institute.