In this chapter on Tunisia, I show how the dynamic between stability and instability, which encourages a more nuanced understanding of the revolution, is produced through ‘contingent encounters of resistance’. Contingency, I argue, comes to be associated with resistance through its convergence with icons. In the first part, I analyse works that incorporate contingent processes and materials (from bread to jasmine) in installations by Aïcha Filali, Nadia Kaabi-Linke and Lara Favaretto and in photographic series by Hela Lamine and Meriem Bouderbala. In the second part, I examine video work produced in the peripatetic mode: Mouna Karray’s Live (2012) projects static images of Ben Ali together with the unedited soundtrack of a conversation between a taxi driver and a passenger who comment freely on the transitional government as they journey through Tunis. I examine a precedent in Ismaïl Bahri’s Orientations (2010), which focuses on the evolving reflections in a cup of ink held by the artist as he walks within the streets of the capital. I consider how this work anticipates the more extreme limitations placed on vision in Bahri’s later videos. Comparative reference is made to works such as Azza Hamwi’s tour around Damascus in A Day and a Button.

Chapter 1 focuses on art that explores the relationship between visibility and invisibility to resist essentialising perspectives of the revolutions in Tunisia or Syria or the wider, problematic idea of the ‘Arab Spring’. It develops the theory and practice of ‘infra-thin critique’ in relation to works that resonate with the dynamics of the infra-thin or that engage directly and ironically with Duchamp’s practices, or with those of his successors. This chapter addresses two particularly recurrent means of exceeding the iconic. Ambivalence between sensorial and dimensional elements is analysed with reference to work in video and installation by Nicène Kossentini and Mounir Fatmi. Alternative means of evoking the revolutions emerge in diverse manifestations of a ‘poetics of absence’ in installations by Safaa Erruas, Sonia Kallel, Aïcha Filali and Shada Safadi. I argue that certain art allows a reworking of the ‘Western’ modernist notion and practice of the infra-thin by drawing on, and developing, local or transnational practices and anchoring these in relation to specific contexts of revolution. These works of art call for a critical approach that is inspired by art theory and practice and that is transnational, as well as transhistorical and multidirectional.