Nadia Kaabi-Linke grew up between Tunis and Kyiv and has lived in Dubai, Sharjah and Paris. Her personal experience of different cultural environments has a direct influence on her work. She is particularly interested in the correlations between political, economic and sociocultural contexts as well as the constructions of identity, memory and perception. The tensions inherent in identity are often reflected in her works. Kaabi-Linke alienates objects, functions and environments, works with optical illusions and explores the threshold between the beautiful and the disturbing. In her work Inner Circle (2021), for example, she inserted needles into a public bench that made it impossible to sit down.
With her work for Ruhr Ding: Schlaf, Nadia Kaabi-Linke approaches the illusory fiction of ‘astro-mining’ – asteroid mining. She has developed an analogue installation in the former Wertheim department store and thus ironically relating the transfiguration of space as a potentially unlimited supplier of raw materials to the mining past in the region.
Nadia Kaabi-Linke (*1978 in Tunis) received her doctorate from the Sorbonne in Paris and lives in Berlin.
