Nadia Kaabi-Linke is a Tunisian-Ukrainian artist whose installations, objects, and pictorial work is embedded in urban contexts, intertwined with memory and geographically and politically constructed identities. 

She had her first exhibition A Matter of Resilience at Darat al Funun in 2020 where she produced Das Kapital—Epilogue (2020), “a video installation with several found objects: a metal gate propped upright by a pile of tawny, unpolished stones and a weathered electric cable. The objects come from Amman, Jordan, where Nadia and Timo noticed a plot of land between two townhouses, empty except for the gate, stones, and cable. After conducting interviews with nearby residents, which became part of the installation, they learned that there used to be a house on the land. Its owner had a dream in which her father said there was treasure buried underneath the house. She went to work accordingly, evicting the tenants and destroying the building, but she found nothing.” “Das Kapital is a potent metaphor for the corrosive desires of capitalism” and “a scathing critique of our economic system.”

“Capitalism, war, colonialism, domestic abuse—these are her subjects, storylines defined by their destruction, tragic irony, and ultimately, regret.” 

Kaabi-Linke studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Tunis, and received a PhD. in Philosophy of Art from the Sorbonne University in Paris. She now lives and works in Berlin. Her work is in several public and private collections including the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Solomon R. Guggenheim, NYC; Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah; Samdani Art Foundation, Dhaka and the Abraaj Group Art Collection, Dubai, UAE, The Khalid Shoman Collection, Amman, Jordan. She received the Ithra art prize in 2021.

Excerpts from “History is Full of Fiction:” In conversation with Nadia Kaabi-Linke and Timo Kaabi-Linke for Femme Art Review by Jess Chen, 2020.