Dark Room reflects on the historical experiences of Jewish and Amazigh Djerbian women during niddah, the Hebrew term for menstruation. Up until the early 20th century, in the artist’s hometown of Hara Sghira, women were secluded in a room in their family home for the duration of their menstruation; daily tasks were put on hold due to their perceived impurity, and replaced with days of confinement and isolation. This period of isolation concluded with the performance of a ritual cleansing at the mikveh, a bath located in each Jewish household, where a woman’s monthly routine of seclusion and purification would come to an end.

In an article for Apartamento Magazine written in 2020, Chaddad considers his personal experience with isolation by recalling his time in Tripoli’s Abu Salim prison in 2010: “...after days of physical and mental torture…sitting in a 2x2m cell, I had no way to write or read, no one to talk to…there was only me and my thoughts, without knowing when it would all end…I learnt that it’s easier to have inner thoughts when you’re alone…and not only without people, but alone without any triggers that push you to think outside of yourself.”

Drawing from reflections on both community-enforced isolation as ritual, and solitary imprisonment as isolation, Chaddad’s work Dark Room speaks to the universal anxieties of solitude and frames its relationship with extrinsic reward. He presents the viewer with the safety of voluntary aloneness: each participant is invited to enter a black tent situated in an olive grove in Djerba, close to his hometown of Hara Sghira, to reflect, meditate, and dream, experiencing the anticipation of ritual purity and prompting each participant to consider the inevitability and necessity of isolation in its varied forms.

This process of isolation, whether expansive or narrow, is productive of confusion, conflict and sorrow. Isolation can never give birth to aloneness; the one has to cease for the other to be. 

-Krishnamurti

Photos by Zied Haddad

Curatorial text by Katherine Li Johnson

Wooden sticks, fabric, rope

Khara Sghira, Djerba, 2022