Nadia Kaabi-Linke
Born in Tunis, 1978 and lives in Berlin, Germany and Kyiv, Ukraine
The art of Nadia Kaabi-Linke is related to places and their histories; it is as time-specific as it is site-specific. The installations and objects, as well as her pictorial works, are anchored in constellations of cultural and historical, social and political contexts and refer to a certain place or to coincidental events. Making use of many different media, artefacts, symbolisms and codes, her work is intertwined with socio-psychological topics: perception, memory, and geographically and politically constructed identities.
Kaabi-Linke has a personal history of migration across cultures and borders that has greatly influenced her work. Her works give physical presence to that which tends to remain invisible, be it people, structures, or the geopolitical forces that shape them.Using a variety of materials and methods, Kaabi-Linke often works in-situ on projects that relate directly to their exhibition sites. She has rendered visible the bodily traces of people waiting at Berlin bus shelters and subway stations, the scars of domestic violence victims in London, and paint chips scraped from city walls throughout North Africa and Europe.
The King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture (Ithra) selected Nadia Kaabi-Linke as the winner of the 4th edition of the Ithra Art Prize, presented in collaboration with Diriyah Biennale Foundation. The Tunis-born, Berlin-based conceptual artist was the first artist not from Saudi Arabia to be awarded the prestigious prize, selected by an esteemed panel of international art experts for her project E Pluribus Unum – Modern Fossil.
