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Plaster, tabla, wooden mask and steel,
270 × 90 × 100 cm
Nidhal Chamekh seeks to translate, in his assemblages of heterogeneous elements, the dissonances, discontinuities and hybridisations that they contain. He is interested in how images, whether historical or current, are not static, but are rather constantly redefining and redeploying themselves across visual culture, literature, the natural and human sciences and other fields. While generally this redeployment acts to underpin and reinforce existing historical and political tropes, there is also a potential for this montage process to contribute to rethinking and reactivating the past in the present.
Chamekh points the discovery of Mezwed by black jazz musicians including Don Cherry whose encounters with Mezwed musicians during a visit to Tunis are recorded in the film Noon in Tunisia (1969). Instruments associated with this musical form, a type of bagpipe and a drum, feature in the sculptures Crouching Venus with tabla and Mezoued and hands