Nidhal Chamekh

Nos visages C

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, which obfuscates the inextricable history of empire.