Sarra Mezhoud

Sarra Mezhoud (Tunisia, 1996) is a doctoral student in contemporary art history at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. Working under the supervision of Pascal Rousseau, her thesis sets out to establish the history of the long process of tattooing’s appearance in Western art worlds, artistic practices and artists’ visual cultures, from the 19th century, when the image of the tattooed body invaded the collective imagination, to the present day, when tattooing has become a work of art. As part of a historiographical approach, her research aims to recognize tattooing as a new art-historical object.

 

In residence at Villa Medici, Sarra Mezhoud will research the exhibition “L’Asino e la Zebra. Origini e tendenze del tatuaggio contemporaneo”, held in Rome at the Markets of Trajan from April 11 to May 5, 1985. Instigated by tattooist Don Ed Hardy and art historian Arnold Gary Rubin, this event, halfway between an exhibition and a tattoo convention, presented tattooing as an art form that had become part of the contemporary artistic and cultural scene since the 1980s. Its controversial organization was spearheaded by Renato Nicolini, Cultural Assessor of the Municipality of the Left in Rome, who has kept the archives. The two-week residency will be devoted to documenting this event, which bears witness to the cultural institutionalization of tattooing’s artistic turn, lending it too an Italian Renaissance.