To live in Tunis is to attend a makeshift fashion show at a club that typically plays grainy loops of underground electronic music. It’s to write a grant application on a borrowed laptop the day before it’s due. It’s to beg a taxi driver to brave a pothole-filled road and get you to a secret exhibition at a warehouse because that’s where the artist felt the most safe. And then, days later, help this very same artist scramble to draft an email to a French journalist, who, without warning, published their name and attributed it to a certain sexual identity despite the risks that came with it.

There is no sprawling infrastructure to support the arts in Tunis. Few and far are the institutions ­handing out tools and space. What exists instead is a kind of ­persistent improvisation. Artists working with what they have, and often in spite of what they don’t. This is ­perhaps what lends the work its texture: in art, in fashion, in music, and in film.

The obstacles are many for an artist in the North African capital. But none of it is incidental. Not to a Tunisian anyway. What’s striking, perhaps, is that not everyone complains. This isn’t a community that lingers in grievance, nor does it define itself by its limitations. The awareness of the constraints exists, but it surfaces mostly in hindsight, or in the voice of an outsider. For those who know Tunis, and for those who are immersed in the day-to-day, there’s just this undefined something that’s disarming. While that’s possibly an acceptance of the city’s disorder – which should not be mistaken for ambivalence – GQ Middle East spoke with the artists whose work is created in conversation with the hardship, not in defiance of it.