Chapter 3 develops the idea that contingent encounters are rooted in diversely transnational aesthetics of contingency, but also that this art invents new combinations or strategies specifically to exceed iconic visions. It focuses on work that generates contingency by involving local or regional traditions of weaving and ceramics, as well as artisans themselves. This chapter also addresses art that engages spectators through recent transnational practices, including interactions characteristic of uses of social media. I show that this work diverges from conventional understandings of chance aesthetics and participatory art. I also argue that participatory works exhibited in physical and virtual public spaces, as well as in galleries, blur the boundaries between sites which are conventionally viewed as separate and as associated with either art or activism. I explore contrasting means of evoking encounters between artist and artisans in work on Tunisia by Majd Abdel Hamid (textiles), Selma and Sofiane Ouissi (video performance) and Sonia Kallel (audio tour and video installation) I then address installations by Collectif Wanda, Mouna Jemal Siala and Wadi Mhiri, and Febrik, which involve spectators in ‘reordering space’ or in making alternative ‘icons’ of Tunisia today or of the revolutions in Tunis, Cairo and Damascus.

Chapter 1 focuses on art that explores the relationship between visibility and invisibility to resist essentialising perspectives of the revolutions in Tunisia or Syria or the wider, problematic idea of the ‘Arab Spring’. It develops the theory and practice of ‘infra-thin critique’ in relation to works that resonate with the dynamics of the infra-thin or that engage directly and ironically with Duchamp’s practices, or with those of his successors. This chapter addresses two particularly recurrent means of exceeding the iconic. Ambivalence between sensorial and dimensional elements is analysed with reference to work in video and installation by Nicène Kossentini and Mounir Fatmi. Alternative means of evoking the revolutions emerge in diverse manifestations of a ‘poetics of absence’ in installations by Safaa Erruas, Sonia Kallel, Aïcha Filali and Shada Safadi. I argue that certain art allows a reworking of the ‘Western’ modernist notion and practice of the infra-thin by drawing on, and developing, local or transnational practices and anchoring these in relation to specific contexts of revolution. These works of art call for a critical approach that is inspired by art theory and practice and that is transnational, as well as transhistorical and multidirectional.