Undertow / Contre ; Courant

B7L9 Art Centre in Bhar Lazreg, on the outskirts of Tunis, presents "Undertow / Contre ; Courant" from 25 October to 31 December 2026. Amanda Abi Khalil and Danielle Makhoul curate the group exhibition, which gathers nineteen artists and Forensic Oceanography. It combines a song that greets visitors, a floor piece commissioned from Akram Zaatari and a looped programme of seven videos, alongside works by the other participants.

The title names a current that runs beneath the surface of the water, against the direction visible above it. The curators apply this image to the Mediterranean, a route of passage, expansion, colonisation and exile. Their text recalls people pushed from home by war, persecution and economic hardship, and calls the sea the largest open-air cemetery. Questions of hosting and being hosted, and of who holds power and privilege, run through the selection.

Sirine Fattouh's song of welcome opens the visit. Bouchra Khalili, Imane Djamil, Randa Maroufi and Forensic Oceanography follow crossings and periods of waiting. Badr El Hammami and Nabila Halim look at exchanges between people close to one another. Catherine Cattaruzza, Sara Kontar and Majd Abdel Hamid work with diaries and other ways of keeping a record, while Lara Tabet draws on what the sea itself discloses. Akram Zaatari's porous floor, shaped like the Mediterranean basin, gathers the footprints of visitors as they move through the exhibition.

The film programme borrows its name from a work by Younes Ben Slimane, "We Knew How Beautiful They Were, These Islands". It loops videos by Sara Sadik, Rania Stephan, Mounira Al Solh, Hiwa K, Valentin Noujaïm, Firas Shehadeh and Ben Slimane himself. Nida Sinnokrot also takes part. The show is a collaboration between Art Explora and the Kamel Lazaar Foundation. It forms part of the Art Explora Festival's stop in Tunis, its twelfth host country, staged within the eighth edition of the Jaou Tunis Biennale.