Subsurface

Selma Feriani Gallery opens its autumn season with Subsurface, the first solo exhibition in Tunis by Peruvian artist Elena Damiani, who is based in Lima. The show fills the gallery's main space in La Goulette from 19 September to 15 November 2026.

Damiani is known for work that reads the present through images and materials of the past, drawing on geology, archaeology, astronomy and cartography. Subsurface turns to geological time and the ways landscapes are formed and altered; as the gallery's text puts it, 'what appears solid is rarely still.'

The exhibition moves between sculpture, photography and works on paper and silk. Testigos X is made of thirty hand-carved travertine rods cut from a single boulder, while Untitled M is a composite photograph of granite formations in Yosemite. Other works include hinged stone panels modelled after Isamu Noguchi's Shrine of Aphrodite series, the hand-painted Kawanaka paper strips of Laminas, the variable transparencies of Fading Fields, printed on silk chiffon, and Relieve V, in which stone oloids have been rolled across dust.

Damiani has shown at the Venice Biennale in 2015, the Gwangju Biennale in 2016 and the Aichi Triennale in 2025, and her work is held by MoMA in New York, the Museo de Arte de Lima and the Pérez Art Museum Miami. Her arrival in Tunis reflects the gallery's long-standing effort to bring international voices into dialogue with the North African scene.

On the mezzanine, Chilean painter Sebastián Espejo presents Winged Stone over the same dates, a quiet counterpoint of small paintings of everyday objects, making the gallery well worth a visit this autumn.