Massoud Hayoun LOS ANGELES, USA, b. 1987
Nos pères et non pas les Gaulois - Qué elegancia la de Francia, 2025
Acrylic on canvas
48 x 36 in
121.9 x 91.4 cm
121.9 x 91.4 cm
Copyright The Artist
This painting is a reflection on the education systems in colonial French North Africa. When my Tunisian grandmother was little, she attended a French public school that taught the students...
This painting is a reflection on the education systems in colonial French North Africa.
When my Tunisian grandmother was little, she attended a French public school that taught the students a song, “Our fathers the Gauls,” with the explicit purpose of having bourgeois colonized people re-envision their ancestries in the French Metropole to the neglect of our own personal, indigenous histories.
Here, I rip through the canvas of this imagined ancestry to reveal another iteration of a work from before, “Uncynical Tunisian love story,” featuring my great great grandparents, who had roots in the Tunisian royal court. We have our own legacies, and they are worthy of our remembrance.
- Massoud Hayoun.
When my Tunisian grandmother was little, she attended a French public school that taught the students a song, “Our fathers the Gauls,” with the explicit purpose of having bourgeois colonized people re-envision their ancestries in the French Metropole to the neglect of our own personal, indigenous histories.
Here, I rip through the canvas of this imagined ancestry to reveal another iteration of a work from before, “Uncynical Tunisian love story,” featuring my great great grandparents, who had roots in the Tunisian royal court. We have our own legacies, and they are worthy of our remembrance.
- Massoud Hayoun.