The conceptual orientation of Safia Farhat’s monumental tapestries, produced in her private atelier in Radès, began to shift as international efforts to revitalize tapestry spurred a category of fiber art known as "la nouvelle tapisserie" in the late 1960s. Challenging tapestry’s traditional relationship to the wall, the artists driving this movement explored the textural and sculptural possibilities of unusual fibers and designed three-dimensional fibrous constructions. As an artist, Farhat followed the attendant debates regarding materiality, form, structure, and process, creating sculptural weavings intended for international exhibition in Lausanne. Established in 1962 by cultural brokers Jean Lurçat and Pierre Pauli, the International Tapestry Biennales of Lausanne created a global forum of exchange connecting artists in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and South America. While Lurçat visited Tunisia in 1961 to consult the Office National de l’Artisanat in its modernization of weaving in collaboration with the Ecole de Beaux-Arts de Tunis, Pauli traveled to Poland in 1963 in search of artistic developments, as authorities attempted to halt cultural exchange with Western Europe. There Pauli “discovered” artists Maria ?Laskiewicz and Magdalena Abakanowicz, who had taken up monumental fiber projects during a period in which weaving received far less scrutiny and censorship than abstract painting. Sharing a studio in ?Laskiewicz’s basement, these two women launched the Atelier Experimental de l’Union des Artistes Polonaise. They, along with other artists from the Eastern Bloc, notably Jagoda Buic from Yugoslavia, quickly surfaced as the biennale “stars,” steering the aesthetic and conceptual domain of tapestry into the realm of three-dimensional emotive abstraction. From her base as director of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Tunis, Farhat engaged with lively debates emanating from Lausanne concerning the evolution of tapestry, exchanging letters with Pauli and other members of the biennale commission. Based on primary research conducted in 2010 at the Fondation Toms Pauli (the biennale research center) and the Archives de la Ville de Lausanne, as well as Tunis (2009-2010) this paper introduces remarkable artistic exchange around a medium that lent itself well to a variety of political contexts, including authoritarian and communist regimes and apartheid South Africa. While interrogating the Lausanne Biennales and the conceptual framework for fiber art that emerged, my focus remains on Farhat, and in particular four tapestries that both demonstrate her contributions to "la nouvelle tapisserie," as well as the mutability of the medium for several significant women artists.