Interview with Tewa Bernossa in the medina of Tunis:

Tewa Barnosa is a conceptual artist, independent curator and the founder of WaraQ Foundation for Arts and Culture, a non-profit organization that aims to revive the Libyan art scene locally and internationally. Barnosa was born and raised in Tripoli and is currently based in Berlin, where she is involved in several socio-political cultural initiatives that support artists in exile. Her own art centers around the topics identity, belonging, ancient histories, the often uncertain future of languages, such as Tifinagh, etc., and collective memory in the social and political context of Libya and North Africa. Barnosa’s work has been exhibited at several institutions internationally, such as Casa Arabe in Spain, Gallerie delle Prigioni in Italy and P21 Gallery London.
She has displayed her artwork in partnership with Ahmed Baroudi during last years Blackbox Libya project in Heidelberg and Berllin. We asked the cultural activist about life and work in times of conflict.

How did you become an artist?

I did not decide to become an artist. It came out of simply practicing it.
It all started in 2014, the time of the airport war, a fierce fight was going on in Tripoli and the airport was shut down. Public life died off for three months and I couldn’t go out. I started practicing art every day 3 to 6 hours. I began with painting because that is where I saw myself for the rest of my life. In the end, I decided to make a career out of it.
What did you do before?
Before 2014, I lived a sort of typical high-school life. I tried a couple of things, but mainly because my mother was pushing me a lot. I gained some experiences in the IT field, learning several programming languages. I participated in a couple of competitions in Tripoli and Benghazi, like C++ or, before that, the Libyan IT-olympics for children.

So you became an artist from scratch. Do you have any family member who are active in art?

Not at all.

The war made you an artist?

It was more or less about the free time. There wasn’t anything else to do. We were in the Nafusa mountains, waiting for the war to be over, I had no plans or anything else to do.

What is the idea behind the WaraQ art foundation, your art initiative in Tripoli?

I’d wanted to organize exhibitions and talks since 2014, but it was only a small thing in the back of my mind. I was then inspired by the art scene in Dubai, which is international but has a strong Arab identity. It brings a lot of cultures together. After my visit there, I thought why don’t we do something like that in Tripoli? We live in a time when the young generation is receiving just little attention. A year after thinking about my own project, I got expelled from the fine art school and had time to start it.

You were expelled from the art school in Tripoli?

The first semester, they didn’t teach how to create art, but how to do stuff the way the instructor wanted it. It felt wrong. I started skipping art classes and started playing the violin. Then I didn’t show up at the exams. Somehow, I was not really ready to follow that teaching system, not a year right after the war.

It was another war, this time against the hierarchy at university?

I would not call it a war. I was simply not convinced, so I started to rent a small studio, together with a friend. More friends started to show up, they were interested in learning. We improvised a lot and a gallery developed out of that.
Many were also able to improve their work through that too. We were painting in the class rooms of a grammar school, then the pupils started skipping school and joined our art workshops. The idea came to me to make art teaching more professional and more accessible for the public.
Like many of my friends, I initially wanted to go abroad and didn’t really want to commit to art. I applied to all kinds of universities worldwide. Then the exchange rate of the Dinar fell, so I literally had no money to go abroad. However, at least I had enough to start something in Tripoli, 35.000 Dinars at the beginning.
It was the only money I had but I used it for the rent of a studio, equipment, printouts and furniture.
It took some time to find out in which directions we wanted the project to go, or what the foundation should look like. We decided finally to open the venue for the public on a daily basis.
The first exhibition was about human rights in Libya and was called “Warning”. I was very proud of it, there was a great public response, but after a week of being an open, a militia wanted to attack the place. However, then they discovered that the owner was a member of the same group, so they told him to deal with it himself, to find a solution since he was known in his neighborhood.
One day I was leaving the art space when he and his friends started accusing me on the street: “Why are you operating a whorehouse in this place?” and other insults. My father fortunately passed by at that time and started to argue with the three of them. Eventually, a loud dispute started, the crowd grew bigger, with people from other stores gathering round.
The situation ended in a fight and my father told me not to talk about it, or publish anything about it. After that incident, I could not continue working since there was a risk that the art center could harm others. Yet, I have nothing else in my life, so I decided not to stop art itself.

What was the exhibition about? A warning about what?

It was about different abuses of human rights in Libya, migration, kidnapping, the lack of freedom of movement, the bad situation in the education sector, freedom of speech. We used different techniques for our narratives: Photography, visual art, paintings and other multidisciplinary mediums.

Are you a political artist?

Recently, yes. The war, migration, these are topics that are present for me like they are for everyone. When I did a solo exhibition in Milan in 2015, it became a collection detailing all the political issues present in Libya.

How do young people regard their lives in Libya after years of conflict?

My circle of friends is a minority, they want a change, they want to do something useful. But if you look at the bigger picture, many want to leave Libya, they want to work in an international NGO and being paid in a foreign currency and be more secure and free than they are now. I partly understand that since working in Libya can really suck up your soul if you are not mentally prepared. The Libyan society became avery toxic society.

In what sense?

Everybody is blaming everyone. That culture of blaming makes everybody to not invest in their future. The negative effect of blaming is that it makes qualified people with good intentions scared to do something positive, because they are scared of the criticism. It is actually more bullying than anything else.

Can you rely on institutions to get a job or to be admitted to universities or any other institution?

Everything you do in Libya is very personal. For example if I would be a curator and I was given the task to organise a good art exhibition, I would choose people with a good Facebook profile or people I know. I would not choose artists who do good work. Libyans take all very emotional and personal. There has never been a collaborative spirit.

Who prepared you for working in this difficult environment?

I would not have done anything of that without my mother. She taught me to focus on my vision and to forget the constant criticism. Nevertheless, I had many breakdowns. But I learned to analyse them and tried to see things from other perspectives after these breakdowns. They were an important key in my life. They helped me to learn.

More and more Libyan artists are surfacing now. Your generation seems to have been a motivating factor.

There was a lot of good feedback on our work as well. If you look back 3 or 4 years, many people were not motivated to do projects. This has changed with the 2014 conflict. A lot of people are working on themselves now again. The last two years we did the “Friends of Dwaya” exhibitions. It included each time new partners since former members had started their solo projects in the meantime. We are proud of this, since these cooperations motivated people to go forward. There is some sustainability in the art scene now. The young generation has to understand that this field is not easy at all. For example: Although I didn’t feel proud, Dwaya and Waraq were inspiring ideas. But I was still not sure if I was going the right path. There was always the spark of self-destruction, it is sometimes very helpful, but also very negative at the same time.

Was this an imposed feeling by society?

Yes, partly it has its root in being constantly criticised. I had a lot of sleepless nights over research work and was only hearing from my professors and co-students that I probably was only able to produce these research papers because of the help of my mother. Yes, people helped me, but I was mainly working hard and still got criticised. A lot of my friends are thinking of themselves in the same way I did because of this negativity: “I cant do this, I can`t make it.”

The revolution happened nine years ago. Why is the society still so negative?

With my focus on political art, I ran into a lot of these reasons. The country has been closed and isolated from the world for 42 years. All what people ever knew was one leader. Of course, if there would be chaos and lawlessness after several generations this will end not good, it will end with many small dictators. People in Tripoli are still closed, new ideas like my art gallery are seen with scepticism. It is a hard environment for art. Because of the war there the level of aggressivity is on the rise as well.

Can art and culture open doors?

Within the WaraQ and Dwaya projects we always work on sensitive themes, recently gender based violence. It is so important that we use art to talk about issues that bother people in daily life. Art can ask questions, provoke, seek answers to the questions, things that we cannot do as individuals.

Blackbox Libya is a cooperation of Heinrich Boell Foundation and Breaking the Ice

https://tn.boell.org/en/blackbox-libya-political-dynamics-and-spaces-artistic-intervention