The series nos visages (Our Faces) is connected to Nidhal Chamekh’s 2019 exhibition bearing the same title. Continuing the artist’s long-standing research into the afterlives of historical images, the works draw on articles from Le Miroir, a French colonial propaganda magazine founded in 1910, in which Senegalese and Berber infantrymen who fought during the First World War were depicted through the reductive lens of colonial, orientalist, and ethnographic photography. As curator Morad Montazami notes, these images existed “somewhere between the ethnographical survey and the hackneyed colonial and orientalist image”, transforming the portrait into a coercive apparatus of classification and control.

Working from archival reproductions whose subjects often remain unnamed, Chamekh fragments, overlays, and recomposes faces through drawing and collage-like assemblage. By joining contradictory half-faces and disrupting anatomical continuity, he removes these figures from fixed systems of identification and representation. Montazami writes that the artist has “radicalized the denial of their existence by overlaying contradictory half-faces among each other”. Rather than restoring stable identities, the drawings recompose anonymous archival portraits through the assemblage of fragmented and overlapping faces, disrupting systems of identification and representation that once transformed colonized subjects into typologies. The series reactivates obscured histories and foregrounds the erased presence of colonial soldiers whose participation in the liberation of France remained on the sidelines, largely excluded from official narratives.