Tunisia’s Bard Museum reopens after closure amid political upheaval – ARTnews.com

After years of starts and stops, the Bardo National Museum, often called the “jewel of Tunisian heritage,” finally reopened this year. Housed in a 17th-century beylic palace in the suburban town of Le Bardo that also houses the country’s parliament, the newly renovated museum has welcomed several thousand visitors in the months since it reopened in September.

The Bardo’s most recent closure came about two years ago after President Kais Saied’s decree to close the parliament, which shares the same building. That was the latest in a series of recent closures that began during the 2011 revolution. It closed again in 2015 for a brief period following a terrorist attack on the museum that killed at least 25 people and also damaged the building . The museum closed again in 2020 due to pandemic lockdowns, when Saied dismissed the country’s prime minister and suspended the People’s Representative Assembly.

In this last period of closure, the museum carried out a building conservation and restoration project that included the expansion of the museum’s exhibition spaces, with new works that were seen and the relocation of some of its most visited objects. Updates include a new sarcophagus room and reimagined displays for the Islamic department, improving the presentation of objects. Several of the museum’s display cases that had been damaged in the deadly terrorist attack in 2015 have now been restored, signaling a welcome return to normality.

The Bardo Museum, which was first established under French colonial rule in 1888, has faced a sharp drop in visitor numbers, and tourism to Tunisia in general, since the 2015 terrorist attack, but visitors have started to return , both residents and tourists. The Tunisian Ministry of Cultural Affairs reported 2,700 visitors in the first week of the museum’s reopening, 900 of whom visited on opening day. The director of the Bardo Museum, Fatma Naït Yghil, said she was “proud of the work done” by her team, adding that police and civil defense units were deployed “to ensure the safety of visitors.”

The Bardo Museum Palace contains Tunisia’s national archaeological and ethnological treasures, with a diverse collection spanning 40,000 years of civilization, including the world’s largest collection of mosaics, many of which are monumental in scale and hang covering walls and ceilings. Among the most prominent are Alcoba de Virgiliorepresenting the Roman poet with his muses, and O Triumph of Neptunedepicting the triumphant sea-god Neptune in a chariot, framed by women representing the four seasons at each corner, surrounded by agricultural scenes and flowering plants.

The Islamic department holds the largest number of “Blue Qur’an” folios, dating from the late 9th to the early 10th century (New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art also owns a folio), as well as a selection of 20th-century ceramics. Maghreb and Anatolia. Other popular attractions include Sala Cartago, the main atrium of the palace lined with large marble sculptures; the gallery of Roman sarcophagi and Christian baptisteries; a collection of Punic jewelry; and ancient Greek artifacts from a shipwreck off Mahdia that were recovered in the 1940s.

A larger-than-life marble statue of Concordia, the Roman goddess of harmony, now greets museum visitors, placed near the entrance next to a memorial plaque remembering the victims of the 2015 attack. Yghil described the symbolic decision to place to Concordia at the entrance as “a message of peace”.

Opened in October, a new room dedicated to the Chemtou Treasure presents an exhibition of the 1,648 gold coins found in a ceramic jug (dated before AD 420) which was made in collaboration with the German Archaeological Institute. Discovered in 1993, the hoard is one of the largest and most important archaeological finds of gold coins in the Maghreb region.

Finnish-Tunisian artist Dora Dalila Cheffi described a recent visit to the Bardo as busy with many local families present. “I’m very happy that the museum is coming back,” he said ARTnews. She found the updated screens for The triumph of Neptune and a famous statue of Venus from the 2nd century to be shocking. “I portray a lot of women in my art, it’s interesting to see how women are portrayed in different contexts,” she said.

The significance of the museum lies in the breadth of its collection, which traces the ancient history of Tunisia, and the exhibitions are organized by periods, corresponding to its various departments, including prehistory, the Phoenician-Punic civilization, the Numidian world, the underwater collection of Mahdia and the last years. antiquity and the early days of Islam. The building, which was converted from the palace that once housed the ruler’s harem, is an architectural marvel in itself, resplendent with patterned tile panels, decorated floors and painted and gilded ceilings.

Tunisian-born art historian and archaeologist Ridha Moumni said the reopening of the Bardo is important because it is an “important educational tool” for Tunisian students. “For the last decade, the Bardo has been a mirror of Tunisian politics,” he said ARTnews. “It is important that cultural institutions are protected from any political event.”

The reopening of the Bardo comes at a time when Tunisia’s cultural offering is expanding rapidly, including L’Art Rue’s Dream City festival, the Kamel Lazaar Foundation’s Jaou festival (its next edition will be held in October 2024) and a growing artistic landscape. spaces, galleries and residences.

It was told by the French-Tunisian writer Farah Abdessamad ARTnews that the long-awaited reopening of the Bardo this autumn means that “the institution represents much more than a cultural offer among many other heritage sites in Tunis. In many ways, the Bard channels a spirit of resistance to the hardships Tunisia is going through; politically, his collection demands that we look at ourselves, Tunisians, as people who have survived the ebbs and flows of empires and regimes. This connection to the past gives us hope when everything else feels hopeless.”