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Ink and nails on paper
30,5h x 23w cm
For nos visages (our faces), Nidhal Chamekh has drawn from articles of French colonial propaganda (the magazine Le Miroir, founded in 1910). Precisely where Senegalese and Berber “infantrymen” were presented somewhere between the ethnographical survey and the hackneyed colonial and orientalist image. We know the importance of the “portrait” in the colonial imagination. Otherwise put, its 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 19th century).
Unable to pin a name to all the faces re-drawn, the artist has once again radicalized the denial of their existence by overlaying contradictory half-faces among each other. This has involved not so much blurring identities as taking the risk of laceration and tatters in order to get as close as possible to the mute wounds of a history told by the official winners.
Duplicating these faces, and tearing them out of a system of coercive representation, in order to incorporate them in another time-frame: the one consisting in linking back up – beneath layers of sacrificed fates – with the “losers of the victory”. These faces which contributed to the liberation of France, but remained forever on the sidelines of its official narrative and a war calling itself a “world” war, when the real theatre had to do with the European colonial empires. As if to better demythologize these photographs, which “delete” individuals by displaying them as propaganda objects, nos visages seem to be seeking their place, defying anatomical rationality, and struggling in a sky filled with orphaned stars.
Morad Montazami in Promethean counter-fires, 2019
Translated by Simon Pleasance
Transfer on fabric
140h x 110w cm
Installation. Transfer on fabric
Variable dimensions
View of the exhibition Diaspora at Home, Kadist Paris