Mouna Karray

Mouna Karray is a Tunisian-French artist whose photography and video works inhabit the space between the intimate and the political. Drawing on both personal experience and wider socio-political realities, her practice explores questions of identity, memory, belonging, borders and displacement, often challenging fixed notions of self and place.

Karray completed a Master’s degree in Photography at Tokyo Polytechnic University, Japan, in 2001. Her years in Japan proved formative, helping her develop the distinctive visual language and deeply reflective approach that have come to define her work, bringing together personal narratives and collective histories, and continually questioning the social, cultural and political forces that shape individual lives.

Over the past two decades, Karray has exhibited internationally, including solo and group exhibitions at institutions such as Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town; the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington D.C.; the SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah; the MMK Museum, Frankfurt; MAXXI, Rome; the Musée du Quai Branly, Paris; and MUCEM, Marseille.

During her residency with Tyburn Foundation at La Foce in the Niccone Valley in July 2026, Karray will continue Identity at Stake, a long-term photographic project initiated more than twenty years ago. First begun in Tokyo in 2001, the project centres on encounters with women from diverse backgrounds. Karray photographs each participant within her own environment before returning to the same setting herself, adopting the woman’s clothing, gestures and posture. Presented as diptychs, the resulting images explore the complexities of identification and difference. While the process seeks proximity to another person’s identity, the photographs ultimately reveal the irreducible distinctions that remain between individuals, highlighting both connection and distance, similarity and difference.

A significant chapter of Identity at Stake took place in Umbria during Karray’s residency at Civitella Ranieri in 2007, where she photographed three local women in their homes. The resulting works were subsequently exhibited internationally, including at the MAMA Museum in Algiers and the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris, and became part of the Nadour Collection in Germany.

Now, almost twenty years later, Karray returns to Umbria as a Tyburn Foundation Fellow to revisit those same relationships and continue the project. During her residency she will photograph the original participants once again, alongside new women from the region, creating a powerful reflection on how identities evolve, time, memory, change and continuity.