Broken Head of Diadumenos draws from archival imagery documenting a fragmentary Roman copy of the Diadumenos, originally attributed to the Greek sculptor Polykleitos and photographed between 1902–1903 by Giovanni Gargiolli for the Photographic Cabinet in Rome. Preserved today within the collections of the Capitoline Museums, the damaged head refers to a sculptural model historically considered, in Roman imagination, as the embodiment of the ideal athlete and the perfected body: a figure whose proportions were mathematically calculated to produce an image of victorious harmony and balance. Within this fractured head emerging from ruins, however, this classical ideal appears weakened, aged, and destabilised, as though the very foundations of Western rationality and its enduring image of youthfulness had become vulnerable to time and decay.

The drawing series emerges from the iconographic archives gathered for Nidhal Chamekh’s project Et si Carthage, where images function simultaneously as documents, remnants, and sites of projection. Through processes of fragmentation and re-composition, the works interrogate the desire to preserve historical forms while exposing the instability of the narratives attached to them.

The drawing further extends into Frictions, a sculptural body of work in which fragments of African masks are combined with Greco-Roman heads. By confronting these worn classical ideals of beauty with African forms made of wood, the works create tensions between permanence and fragility, canon and marginality. Bringing together visual traditions historically separated through colonial and museographic frameworks, Chamekh challenges the hierarchies through which cultural objects have been classified, circulated, and historically valued.