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
Qatar–Saudi Arabia diplomatic conflict Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, who fled to Saudi Arabia. Widespread Al Jazeera coverage of the Bahraini uprising of 2011 fueled Saudi suspicions the Qatari government sought to overthrow the Saudi government via soft power. The Saudis then supported a largely successful counterrevolution to the Arab Spring to preserve the monarchy of Bahrain, overthrow the Egyptian democratically-elected president Mohammad Morsi and stymie international support for the post-Gadaffi government in Libya. Since the 2013 Egyptian coup d'état by Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, there has been a consistent pattern of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Egypt opposing the designs of