Tunisian collaborative painting Tunisian collaborative painting Tunisian Collaborative Painting is an art form developed in Tunisia in the mid-1980s. It is unique in its method of allowing a group of artists to work simultaneously on a canvas without discussion or planning beforehand. The result is a painting created by a group of individuals that looks like the work of a single artist. Tunisian artist Hechmi Ghachem created Tunisian Collaborative Painting in 1988 when Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali became president and dictator of Tunisia. “Freely expressing yourself in Ben Ali’s Tunisia was dangerous,” said Hechmi. He set out to reclaim freedom of expression for
Zine El Abidine Ben Ali candidates were required to get endorsements from 30 political figures. Given the RCD's near-absolute dominance of the political scene, prospective opposition candidates discovered they couldn't get their nomination papers signed. The subsequent years saw the return of several Bourguiba-era restrictions. For many years, the press had been expected to practice self-censorship, but this increasingly gave way to official censorship. Amendments to the press code allowed the Interior Ministry to review all newspaper and magazine articles before publication. In 1992, the president's older brother Habib Ben Ali was tried in absentia in France for laundering the proceeds of drug trafficking, in