ART News

At 1-54 in New York, North African Artists Shine and Afro-Caribbeans Get Their Due

The best work in Larkin Durey’s booth explores how political systems dictate who is remembered and how, as well as what constitutes resistance against an enemy like omission. Massoud Hayoun, an Egyptian Tunisian painter and a talent worth following, proposes a “radical refusal” of such so-called histories. His latest body of work draws on the oral stories shared with him by his community’s elders to create a properly complicated portrait of people who weathered exile and loss with their idiosyncrasies intact. This reality, though, looks a lot like a dream. He paints with a Technicolor palette that favors the distinctive blue hues that accent Tunisian architecture (and whose invention can be traced back to ancient Egypt). And much like a dream, individual and collective memory coexist. One protagonist sits in his lover’s bed, and the bed hides a ghost—a lion, maybe Tunisia’s last known Barbary lion killed in 1891. Habib Hajallie, a Sierra Leonean-Lebanese mixed media artist, likewise sources antique maps and vintage texts to reconstruct Black, Arab histories that were buried or warped by colonial entities. For Say Your Prayers, Eat Your Vitamins & Don’t Be Racist (2021), he drew a bodybuilder exhibiting his physique directly on a 1936 document, as if the man refused to be reduced to print.

 

Text by Tessa Solomon

May 22, 2025