The Medina of Sousse is built on layers of Islamic heritage. Its arches, mosques, and courtyards speak of a past where faith and daily life were inseparable. It is within this architecture that anthropologist and curator Soraya Hosni founded The New Medina, a cultural space that is not just a gallery but also a residency, a sanctuary, and a home for artists to reimagine heritage in a living form.
Its first group exhibition, Sounds of Prayer, begins with three photographs of Hosni’s grandmother captured by Turkish-American photographer Ayşe Gürsöz, whose work often documents indigenous communities with a focus on human rights and climate justice. At the center, an image of her in prayer sets the tone for everything that follows, folding the personal into the architectural, the intimate into the historical. From there, the space opens up: prayer rugs spread across the floor, their orientation tracing the same direction as the mosques around them. Neon calligraphy glows against centuries-old walls. Meanwhile, an olive tree anchors the courtyard, alive with birdsong, invoking the Quranic symbol of light.
The works gathered here are bound by one theme: prayer. Yet Hosni stretches its meaning beyond the technical salat, into something cosmological. “Prayer in our Islamic tradition isn’t just human,” she explains. “It’s the living and the dead, the humans before us and those who will come after us. It’s plants, animals — every creation.” In this sense, Sounds of Prayer feels less like a formal exhibition and more like a meditation unfolding inside a living home.
The artists she invited reflect this expansive vision. The British photographer Peter Sanders, celebrated for documenting Islamic scholars across the world, is shown in Tunisia for the first time. Samira Idroos, based in Los Angeles, presents prayer rugs infused with hip-hop lyrics, blending ritual with pop culture. Karim Jabbari, Tunisia’s master of light calligraphy, turns devotion into a glowing script. And Hosni herself contributes the most intimate work: the photographs of her grandmother, a gesture of personal courage that blurs the line between private memory and public culture.
For Hosni, who is both anthropologist and curator, reclaiming Islamic art means shifting it from cliché to lived practice. “We don’t want other people to define it for us,” she says. “We want to define it for ourselves.” By positioning prayer not as dogma but as culture, she sidesteps Tunisia’s love-hate relationship with religion and reframes it as something more essential, more human.
The New Medina is more than a venue. It is, in Hosni’s words, a manifesto. She insists on gender balance in the artists she brings together for the exhibition and on what she calls the spectrum of tolerance, where everyone — devout or secular, queer or traditional — can feel welcome in the space. Having lived in France and the United States, she knows how Muslim artists often mute parts of themselves under the pressure of Islamophobia. Here, they are invited to bring their spirituality to the forefront of their practice, without apology.
What makes the project radical is not only the art it brings together but its location. Sousse was once a cosmopolitan port where scholars and travelers converged, and Hosni sees her work as a continuation of that history. By rooting The New Medina in a small North African city rather than Tunis, Paris, or Dubai, she is reclaiming culture on local terms. “This was a hub of culture in ancient times,” she says. “It’s important for us to honor that heritage ourselves.”
The audience reflects this mission. Teenagers drawn by English-language posts on social media mingle with older couples who had never considered stepping into such a space; neighbors and shopkeepers drop by, curious about what lies behind the door. Hosni estimates that eighty-five percent of visitors to Sounds of Prayer were attending their first exhibition of any kind. For her, this is not incidental but essential. “I wanted people to be invited to think about something they may or may not do, but that exists,” she explains. “And if this was an invitation to pause, then I am happy.”
Hosni does not separate art from responsibility. She sees curating as part of a larger struggle to protect heritage, environment, and memory. “If we neglect our coastal environment and we neglect the Medina, what do we have left?” she asks. “I don’t believe we have the right to let it die.” For her, The New Medina is not just a site of cultural production but an act of preservation, proving that heritage is best protected when it is lived and reinvented.
Sounds of Prayer may be the first group show to emerge from The New Medina, but it already reads like a declaration. Islamic art here is not frozen in museums or staged for global validation. It is personal, rooted, spiritual, and defiantly present. Hosni describes her project simply: “For me, The New Medina is an invitation. To rest, to create, to share. To love yourself, to love your culture, and to be fully yourself.”
In that sense, The New Medina itself is the artwork. A living experiment where prayer, memory, and culture breathe the same air, and where Islamic art is no longer an artifact of the past but a practice of the present.
“Sounds of Prayer” is running until September 20 at The New Medina in the Medina of Sousse. Visit thenewmedina.com for more information.
