From Tunisia to Finland, what do fairytales transmit on to the little children who listen to them?
The Finnish Tunisian artist Dora Dalila Cheffi draws on traditional Tunisian, Finnish, and Western tales and on her own experience to produce this story. Against contemporary feminist rewritings of our childhood stories, she offers the main character no glorious or emancipatory path forward. The child seems to be a victim of her little girl destiny, as if it were inevitable. She is both the object of and witness to mockery, pressure, and sexist violence enacted by the other women in her family, who are personified as a twelve-headed monster—in Finnish, the kaksitoistapäinen sukulaisjoukko. The end of the story does not suggest a possible liberation: despite being endowed with a superpower, the child, in the grip of loneliness, submits to the law.
Through her kitsch, queer, and childlike aesthetic, the artist appropriates visual elements from children’s TV shows such as Finland’s Pikku Kakkonen. With humor, she tackles the issues of gender-based violence within families, sexism, and the social and familial control of women’s bodies. Dora Dalila Cheffi’s tale has no moral. It does, however, transgress social norms through its narrative and visual universe, focusing our attention on the tenacious reproduction, within the family, of repressive norms that hinder women’s emancipation.
Director, Producer and Writer: Dora Dalila Cheffi
Narrator & Performer: Saban Ramadani
Editor & Sound designer: Lucas Sene
Set Designer: Ansku Heiskanen
Sound recording: Juho Luukkainen
Text Editor in Finnish: Aurora Rämö & Tero Kartastenpää
Text Editor in English: Amina Kaabi
Translator to English: John Kaye
Translator to Arabic: Soumaya Hedhili
With the help of Amanda Palo, Markus Tamminen, Otto Helkama, and Arif Samaletdin.
Dora Dalila Cheffi (b. 1990, Helsinki) lives and works between Tunis and Helsinki. Her work encompasses painting, video and installation. Initially trained in art education, in which she obtained a BA from Aalto University School of Art, Design, and Architecture, where she also studied sculpture and painting, her practice developed to encompass a practice that centres on a highly personal approach to painting and video. Much of Cheffi’s work centres around observations and immediate experience, which are translated into works characterised by vivid colours and forms.
Her artwork has been part of group shows with Nuoret 2023, MACAAL – Museum of African Contemporary Art Al Maaden, Villa Medici, Talan L’Expo, Subliminal Projects, Selma Feriani Gallery, Institut finlandais, and shown online with Other Space by Andersen’s Contemporary and Taymour Grahne Projects.
She’s currently working on a new body of work that consists of a video piece and series of paintings. Some of the pieces will be produced during her residency period at the Serlachius Residency in Finland and first exhibited at the Wusum Gallery in Doha and at the Porvoo Art Hall.
Mediabox is Forum Box gallery’s space dedicated to media art. The program is created in collaboration with AV-arkki.
There are three steps to the media art space Mediabox, but the work is also available for viewing on a tablet by request. Please don’t hestitate to contact our staff if Mediabox is inaccessible for you.