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The Marseille Museums are presenting a major exhibition dedicated to tattooing practices in the Mediterranean, from Antiquity to the present day. Paintings, sculptures, photographs, videos, everyday objects, and fashion creations punctuate a multidisciplinary journey combining history, archaeology, art, ethnology, and anthropology. The exhibition also explores current expressions of tattooing in Marseille and its place in popular imagination. Highlights include a monumental, new work created for the occasion by Algerian artist Denis Martinez. Organized in partnership with the Museo delle Culture (MUDEC) in Milan, the exhibition benefits from major loans from French and international institutions (the Louvre, the Musée d'Orsay, the Egyptian Museum in Turin, etc.), echoing the Marseille collections. This is an extension of the Baya exhibition. An Algerian Heroine of Modern Art (2023), a large space is given to Mediterranean artists who have integrated tattoo motifs into their works, at the crossroads of avant-gardes, feminist movements and decolonial struggles in Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt or Iran. The public will be able to discover rare works by Choukri Mesli, Samta Benyahia, Farid Belkahia, Lalla Essaydi or El Meya, as well as two drawings by Ahmed Cherkaoui (1967), recently acquired by the City of Marseille. Finally, a new creation by Denis Martinez, designed especially for the walls of the Centre de la Vieille Charité, will close the exhibition. Founder of the avant-garde group Aouchem ("tattoos") in the 1960s, the artist now lives between Blida and Marseille.
Tattoo. Stories from the Mediterranean
La Vieille Charite
2 Rue de la Charité, 13002 Marseille
Tuesday to Sunday from 9 a.m. to 18 p.m.
Late opening on Thursdays from 19 p.m. to 23 p.m.
Until September 28
Free admission
