Episode 222: Tunisian Peinture Sous Verre – A History in Reverse

This lecture provides an introduction to reverse glass painting in Tunisia, a predominantly figurative form of Islamic art that is often referred to as a “popular” tradition. As very little archival material and original documentation exists, most of what we know about this painting practice comes from collections, scholarship, and stories told about it from the 1960s and on, over one hundred years after it had already been well established in Tunisia. To highlight this belated epistemology, the presentation follows a reverse chronology of the medium. After briefly introducing the technique and artistic process, it starts from the contemporary moment and moves backwards in time to the post-independence era, the Protectorate period, and earlier. It ends with some speculations about the connections between Tunisian under-glass painting and other historical or regional visual-material practices.

Ava Katarina Tabatabai Hess is a PhD candidate in Art History at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). Her dissertation focuses on vernacular Islamic art from Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco, examining the proliferation of reverse glass painting and chromolithography in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as well as their post-independence recuperations. She conducted fieldwork in Tunisia in 2022 with support from an AIMS grant, and from October 2023 to April 2025 as a FLAS research fellow and a Fulbright-Hays fellow, with additional research undertaken in Algeria, Morocco, and France. She earned her BA from Columbia University in Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies, and a master’s in Visual, Material, and Museum Anthropology from the University of Oxford. Ava is also a curator, a contributing researcher with the Arabic Design Archive, and currently serves as Arts Editor of Ufahamu: A Journal of African Studies.

This podcast was recorded at the Centre d’Études Maghrébines à Tunis (CEMA) on the 4th of November, 2025.

We thank Mohammed Boukhoudmi for his interpretation of “Elli Mektoub Mektoub” for the introduction and conclusion of this podcast.

Production and editing: Lena Krause, AIMS Development and Digital Resources Liaison.