Nos visages C

2019 - Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

140 x 120 cm

Nidhal Chamekh

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Nos visages ( Our Faces ) continues Nidhal Chamekh’s research around visual souvenirs of figures of the past and the light they might shed on our contemporary era. For this series of drawings, the artist draws from articles of French colonial propaganda, specifically the magazine Le Miroir , founded in 1910. In these documents Senegalese and Berber “infantrymen” participating in the First World War were represented in a way that situates them “somewhere between the ethnographical survey and the hackneyed colonial and orientalist image” says Morad Montazami. The colonial portrait becomes what he calls “a photographic apparatus for capturing an individual’s features, reduced to an identikit portrait of the Colonized, the Foreigner, and the Slave (a system shared with the developments of anthropometric and criminological photography, in the late 19thcentury).” With many of these magazine portraits leaving their subjects nameless, Chamekh pastes half faces together, removing them from all existing schemes of recognition and representation. He reconstitutes and revisits silenced histories, highlighting these figures who fought for France but who were written out of official narrative, that which obfuscates the inextricable history of empire.

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Based between his native Tunis and Paris, Nidhal Chamekh’s work is an investigation into history as a point of access to our contemporary times. Drawing on both biography and politics, his work takes the form of drawing, installation, photography and videos. His drawings demonstrate a technique that is perpetually developed and challenged through his employment of a variety tools including pencil, brush, bread, charcoal and sponge. Despite the experimental application method, his execution is precise in its pursuit to replicate and observe reality. His line, essentially fragmented, draws on all eras and confuses spaces and cultures. We could consider his work as a sampler of the chaos of history developing cross-sections of this chaos and constituting a kind of social and cultural archaeology that renders the historical complexity of images perceptible.

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Colors:

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• drawing.n.02
• history.n.02
• portrayal.n.01
• colonialism.n.01
• identity.n.02