Taking the language of notation as a starting point for her explorations, Lina Ben Rejeb’s works build on the tensions between visibility and legibility alongside the serendipitous shapes and patterns revealed through layering and partial obliteration. Choosing photocopying and painting as her primary techniques, she approaches texts as a pictorial surface. For this artist, text becomes a site of transformation, choosing to translate entire written works into series of undulating, monochromatic forms. In this, a new kind of visual language emerges. Ben Rejeb’s artworks establish a dialogue around the accessibility and transmission of language, for example in any translation of Arabic to Latin, parlance and phraseology will inadvertently become lost in communication. In rendering a language that in essence is unreadable, she draws attention to the very inevitability of distortion.
Selected solo exhibitions include Vingt Fois sur le Métier Remettre l’Ouvrage, Selma Feriani Gallery, Tunis (2016) and Et un Certain Ordre, Assemblées, Florence Léoni Gallery, Paris (2013). Her works are held in private and public collections in Belgium and Tunisia.