From 3 to 19 October 2025, the Dream City Arts Festival marked its tenth edition in Tunis, activating the Medina and parts of the city centre through contemporary art. This article is the first in a two part series focusing on the exhibition Suni’a Bisihrika (صُنع بسِحرك) — Made with Your Magic, curated by Tarek Abou El Fetouh. The author centres the work of Iraqi artists Ali Eyal, Sajjad Abbas, and Mounir Salah, whose practices build new worlds of learning, friendship, and survival from within Iraq in the void left by weakened or destroyed institutions.

From October 3 to 19, 2025, Dream City arts festival marked its tenth edition in Tunis. Inside the Medina/the old city, and parts of the city centre/the modern city, art moved again through alleyways, courtyards and run-down heritage buildings. Within the larger framework of Dream City stood an exhibition: Suni’a Bisihrika (صُنع بسِحرك)— Made with Your Magic, curated and conceived by Tarek Abou El Fetouh, gathering twenty artists from across the Arab world and its diasporas — from Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon, Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, and beyond — with twenty-seven works, ten of which were new commissions. 

It is not a simple exhibition, but the opening movement of a longer journey — one that will travel from Tunis to Beirut, Damascus, Jeddah, and Baghdad, before returning to Tunis in 2027. 

Tunis: Opening movement through the Medina 

The exhibition takes its title from the mnemonic phrase Suni’a Bisihrika, used to memorise the eight main maqāmāt in Arabic music. Framing the exhibition through the curatorial matrix of the maqām, Abou El Fetouh invites us to explore magic, the unseen, ritual, and social transformation through the maqām as both scale and mode: a structure for improvisation that carries emotional, geographic, and historical inflections. 

Like each maqām travelling across space and time, each venue in Tunis was designed to weave together what connects us: the invisible resonances between cities, languages, and past and present wounds and struggles for emancipation. Each site was paired with a specific maqām, with corresponding music played throughout the day in an adjoining café, allowing the exhibition to extend into the city’s sonic and social life —  signaling that listening is a precondition for relation. 

The exhibition brought in conversation works by Etel Adnan, Sajjad Abbas, Noor Abuarafeh, Alla Abdunabi, Mona Hatoum, Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige, Ali Eyal, Alia Farid, Saif Fradj, Sonia Kallel, Fredj Moussa, Jumana Manna, Iman Mersal & Kayfa ta, Philip Rizk, Walid Raad, Mounir Salah, Ayman Zedani, Iman Issa, Haythem Zakaria, and Ala Younis. Spanning different generations, geographies, and artistic lineages, these artists carry distinct histories and sensibilities into the exhibition. To see these practices side by side is not to chart national origins, but an invitation to think across them — to recognise how memory, exile, disappearance, and persistence travel differently for and with each artist, yet reverberate together in a region marked by the ongoing violence of imperialism, colonialism — and their continuum. Relation becomes the method, not representation; the exhibition gathers diverse practices without flattening, and listens without dissolving specificity. In Tunis, this concept takes place not only metaphorically but underfoot: the exhibition inscribes a new cartography onto the Medina, one we traverse with our bodies moving between maqāmāt, between cafés and alleyways, between private and public spaces — as if relations had to be rehearsed in movement and imagined politically through that very same movement. 

For its tenth edition, Dream City returned to the streets, between hope and exhaustion. The transformation of the main street — Bourguiba Street — leading to the Medina, with barbed wire and barriers, felt like an echo of our present, and of other geographies of containment. For so many of us in Tunisia, having public events of this scale felt, within a state of asphyxiation and all its contradictions, like the return of a distant and precious pulse. 

Suni’a Bisihrika asks: what does it mean — and what does it take — to live amid compounded catastrophes and still conjure the possibility of not only beauty, but also of relation and resistance? 

Within the Medina’s narrow arteries, this question vibrated against the reality of our present — a city where the dream of freedom was once enacted in the streets and is now policed back into silence. 

And with that, Palestine was everywhere in the capital. October 2025 marked forty years since Israel’s bombing of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) headquarters in Hammam al-Chatt, a southern suburb of Tunis. Just weeks earlier Tunisia had hosted the Maghreb and Global Sumud flotillas, attacked off the capital’s coast of Sidi Bou Said. The past returned as repetition — the same violence, the same impunity, the same political silence — a refrain our region knows too well, resounding even more as the genocide in Gaza continued to unfold in real time. 

Another country, another open wound in our collective memory and political imaginaries and consciousness runs through the exhibition like an undercurrent: Iraq. 

Iraq as persistent resonances 

In Tunis, Iraq did not appear in one register but in several: some works sounded from inside the wound, others from the distance of memory, research, or inherited and shared grief. Here, we stay close to the artists whose practices emerge from within — Ali Eyal, Sajjad Abbas, and Mounir Salah. 

In a second part, to continue a wider inquiry into how Iraq continues to shape artistic and political imagination across the region, we will turn toward the constellation of echoes that respond from elsewhere — through the works of Alia Farid, Iman Mersal, Etel Adnan, and Ala Younis (whose work will be discussed here). 

Tarek Abou El Fetouh conceived the exhibition route as a walk through the Medina, with shifting tempos and thresholds: from open streets to the intimacy of enclosed spaces, from confrontation to reflection. Moving from one maqām to the next, visitors traversed not only the Medina but also time itself — crossing between past and present, between Iraq’s resonances and the echoes they have sparked across the region. 

The sequence that follows in this essay mirrors that walk — each artist appearing in the same order, at the same tempo and spatial threshold as in the exhibition itself. 

Mounir Salah — To Hell with Art (2025) 
Venue: National Center for Music and Popular Arts – Sidi Saber 
Maqām Rast — Music from this maqām played all day at Café Margoum 

To Hell with Art unfolds as an encounter between an emerging filmmaker and the archive of a forgotten figure in Iraq’s cultural history: Aziz Ali (1910–1995). Salah turns the camera on himself, watching unearthed recordings of the poet, singer, and monologist once known for turning laughter into a melodic political weapon, broadcast widely on Iraqi radio and television. Through irony and song, Aziz Ali exposed the hypocrisies of successive political regimes — and paid for it with years of censorship and persecution. The film alternates between archival footage, personal enquiry and talking-head interviews. Aziz Ali’s life traversed almost a century of his country’s history, and the importance of his words, songs, and satire is recounted by many who in the present day still feel their potency.  

“To Hell with Art” projected on screen, by Mounir Salah. Photo credit: Samia Labidi. 

The film becomes a meditation on inheritance and transmission, an attempt to listen across generations to a voice that resisted. Salah doesn’t treat Ali merely as a subject but rather engages him as a thinking, dialoguing presence. In To Hell with Art, he begins this investigation through doubt, facing Ali’s image as both mirror and provocation. What, he seems to ask, is the use of art — and the responsibility of the artist — when the world it once sought to change or repair keeps breaking? This work marks the first step in a broader project, supported by the newly established Iraqi Film Fund, through which Salah will expand this inquiry into a feature film. 

What the film brings to the surface is not only Aziz Ali’s sharp political wit, but the constancy of artistic integrity across political regimes — the insistence on a voice that refuses to bend to power even as power continuously mutates. The history it excavates extends far beyond Iraq; censorship and repression persist elsewhere, but take different shapes. To Hell with Art reminds us that repression does not prevent art from being made — it makes the stakes of speaking out higher.  

This resonance is heightened by the exhibition’s spatial dramaturgy. Salah’s work is installed alone in a music school classroom, and the next stop on the parcours — only minutes away — is a preparatory school (where we encounter Ala Younis’s work alongside Philip Rizk and Walid Raad). The walk between the two becomes a hinge between artworks and a meditation on transmission: how knowledge is passed on, how it is interrupted, who is allowed to speak, and how collective history is written — or erased. Moving through the Medina, we carry the questions raised here into the next venues, not as answers but as unresolved urgencies: What survives political violence? What do we inherit — and how do we choose to carry it? 

Placed early in the parcours, Salah’s work becomes a threshold for the rest of the exhibition. It positions artistic responsibility as one of the first questions the visitor is invited to sit and walk with — a question that will later reappear with different tonalities in the subsequent works. With Abbas, it will surface as the uncompromising insistence on speaking truth to power and claiming the right to look back at the machinery of violence. With Eyal, it will take the form of an impossible archival work, confronting the wound of disappearance — asking how to hold the people and histories that have been removed from the record, and how to keep speaking to those who cannot answer back. 

In this sense, To Hell with Art does more than re-introduce a historical figure; it sets one of the conceptual registers present through the exhibition: the artist not as commentator on catastrophe, but as custodian of memory, refusal, and transmission across generations. 

Sajjad Abbas — I Can See You (2013) 
Venue: Association Culturelle El Makhzen – Halfaouine 
Maqām Bayati — Music from this maqām played all day at Café Taht El Sour. 

Maqām Ajam— Music from this maqām played all day at Café El Abbassia 

I Can See You (2013) by multidisciplinary artist Sajjad Abbas is among the most well-known and defining artistic gestures of Baghdad after the 2003 U.S.-led occupation. On a rooftop overlooking the Green Zone, he unfurled a massive banner: his own eye staring out, accompanied by the words Akder Ashoufak / I Can See You. The work was simple and unflinching: a citizen and an artist affirming the right to look back at power. From that vantage point, he turned his gaze to the fortified enclave of power, bureaucracy, and foreign control. Abbas addressed the machinery that had turned his country into a theatre of destruction, control, and extraction from foreign armies to private contractors, profiteers feeding on the very devastation they produced. 

“I see you” on a rooftop, by Sajjad Abbas. Photo credit: Samia Labidi. 

The risks were immense. Akder Ashoufak was not a slogan but an act of reversal: a way of reclaiming agency and clarity without succumbing to despair. The work had to be removed within days; Abbas filmed that forced erasure, and sitting once more on the rooftop, gazing directly into the camera he says: “I can see you”. His humour pierced the screen as both defiance and method: a way to endure, to name power without submitting to it. 

Sajjad Abbas at Dream City 2025. Photo credit: Mehdi Ben Temessek. 

The rise of surveillance and crushing of dissent are global, yet installed as a single art piece in the tiny venue of El Makhzen, Abbas’ installation meets Tunis in its current socio-political climate of exhaustion, suppression of dissent and tightening of civic space. To leave the venue and walk toward the next maqām, or to choose to sit in the adjoining café where the music plays all day, the visitor must pass the police station on the busy Bab Souika street. The viewer becomes suddenly aware of themselves as a body that looks — and that can be seen looking.  Away from Baghdad, the affective charge of the piece is reactivated; not by analogy, but by leading viewers into spatial conditions where looking also produces vulnerability, and it produces a new choreography of looking — not only within the artwork, but around it. 

In Tunis, I Can See You unfolds like a whisper of resistance. Despite its near-invisibility in public space, the inclusion of the piece feels like an act of defiance — one that invites us to consider how the gesture translates differently across time and space. 

Ali Eyal — “6×9 doesn’t fit everything and” (2021/2025) & “Look at what’s left inside the bag” (2021/2025) 
Venue: Safahat – Bab Lakouas 
Maqām Nahawand — Music from this maqām played all day at Café Layelli Zamen 

Ali Eyal’s work moves through absence — through what remains when bodies, homes, and histories are erased, and when exile becomes a second open wound. Installed in the courtyard of Safahat, a cultural and literary community space, his two works unfold family archives like private cases reopened in public, but on his own terms. 

The works occupy a courtyard room like fragments of an investigation. The largest piece is not placed in front of the viewer but off to the side, forcing a deliberate turn of the body: “6×9 doesn’t fit everything and” returns to a photograph of a firebombed car, one his father and uncles once drove before they were killed in 2006 amid the violence that followed the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. The photograph is central but withheld: its image concealed, its reverse side bearing only a blue-ink description. What remains visible are the layers around it with sketches, folders and albums, suggesting an unfinished investigation, an archive that refuses closure. 

Text in blue ink on the back of a photo of a car on fire after being bombed, by Ali Eyal. Photo credit: Samia Labidi. 

Eyal has spoken many times over of his refusal to show faces, his own or those of the missing, as an act of care, a way to honour memory rather than conceal it. He insists on the existence of those who have been erased — holding them in language, image, and doubt when no institution will. His works gather these remnants into constellations that oscillate between the factual and the imagined, the remembered and the re-invented. In a call, he described himself simply as a “storyteller,” adding “and every work is never finished. I add numbers to them so I can come back to revisit them. My artwork is still an open book about Baghdad, it’s a farm, an imaginary farm. But it’s also my family’s farm that I lost and that I keep fertilizing with stories.” 

With Eyal, the question of artistic responsibility incorporates the ethics of memory and its representation. Eyal’s work gestures to what cannot be reconciled, to the impossibility of documentation and the refusal of oblivion when catastrophe exceeds the frame: the magnitude of the organised violence that engulfed Iraq after the U.S.-led invasion and occupation is to this day unfathomable. Where Abbas confronted power and Salah addressed history, Eyal faces disappearance itself. His contribution questions the modes of remembrance and the enduring trauma that is at once intimate and collective. 

Lineages, support structures, and collective infrastructures 

To understand the force of these works we have to step back from the artworks and consider the infrastructures that held them: they emerged not despite collapse, but because artists built new worlds of learning, friendship, and survival in the void left by destroyed or weakened institutions long before any formal support returned.  

Both Eyal and Abbas are graduates of Baghdad’s Institute of Fine Arts — the historic nucleus of Iraqi modernism that trained and was later shaped by artists such as Jewad Selim and Shakir Hassan Al-Said. Eyal and Abbas later took part in SADA (meaning: echo), an independent initiative founded and led by Rijin Sahakian in Baghdad (2011–2015) to respond to the collapse of state cultural institutions after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion. SADA operated online with Iraqi artists in exile, and in person by bringing artists from the region into Iraq, holding together worlds that war and displacement had torn apart. For many of its participants, SADA was not only a platform but a lifeline — a formative space of mentorship, experimentation, and mutual care at a time when war and displacement tore their world apart.  Although it no longer exists, its echoes persist across space and time, forging lasting relations among those it gathered. 

These lineages extend beyond Baghdad, as Eyal later participated in Home Works at Ashkal Alwan in Beirut in 2016 and 2017, where Walid Raad, also featured in Suni’a Bisihrika, was once again one of his mentors, presented work that plays on the fictionalisation of archives, a thread that resonates closely with Eyal’s practice. Another formative influence has been Jalal Toufic,  whose concept of “surpassing disaster” is in conversation with Eyal’s work. His piece in Tunis continues an earlier work first presented by Kayfa ta under the curatorial direction of Ala Younis and Maha Maamoun in Beirut. In Tunis, another kind of encounter took place between Iraqi artists Salah, Abbas and Ala Younis, who was born in Kuwait and raised in Amman — one that made visible the ethics of relation rather than the optics of representation that can be extractive, especially with works dealing with trauma or political resistance. Younis (whose work will be discussed in Part II of this article) invited Salah and Abbas (Eyal was not present) to view her own piece, which traces Baghdad’s long architectural and political history and whose recent history shaped and scarred their generation. She shared that she felt responsible for bringing them into the space of the work — to sit with its triggers rather than avoid them. Her gesture made clear that the care in her practice, as both artist and curator, is not conceptual but embodied: she insists on alignment between words and action, and on artistic processes that remain accountable to those whose histories they touch. 

This stands in sharp contrast with what happened in 2022, around the time SADA briefly re-grouped at Documenta 15, and when Abbas’s I Can See You returned to the centre of international attention because he withdrew it from the Berlin Biennale, reaffirming the need for accountability within global art circuits. This withdrawal was not an isolated protest but the continuation of a shared position forged over years of collective conversation within SADA: a commitment to ensuring that Iraq — and the violence inflicted on its people — is not mined for spectacle, and that artists retain full agency over how, when, and under what conditions their lived experience becomes visible. 

Seen together, the practices of Salah, Abbas, and Eyal  open distinct conversations while revealing a shared lineage through infrastructures of care and persistence. Without these infrastructures of relation, the works presented in Tunis, and the possibility of their resonance, would not exist. 

Within Suni’a Bisihrika the echoes of Iraq linger not as a uniform narrative but as an undercurrent:  an untranslatable grief that threads through the works of these three artists, and through the exhibition itself. If the works of Abbas, Eyal, and Salah resonate from within Iraq’s body, those of others like Adnan, Younis, Mersal, and Farid trace these echoes outward — through Iraq’s reverberations in neighbouring imaginations, and through the infrastructures of publishing, research, and film.  

These works form an emotional throughline of the opening movement in Tunis. They ask how to remember, how to resist, and how to keep creating when catastrophe reshapes every horizon — a question that Etel Adnan taught us to hear again and again without turning away. In doing so, they trace the beginning of a journey in which resonance becomes method. The next essay continues this inquiry by widening the frame from the artworks themselves to the relational infrastructures that sustain them, positioning Iraq as a shared horizon.