Exhibitions

Frictions is a series of sculptures and original collages that extends and builds upon Chamekh’s 2024 solo exhibition, Et Si Carthage?, investigating historical narratives, representation, and cultural hybridity. The series begins with a detail from the installation The King and the Mask (2024), in which an ivory mask is placed to the left of the body and adorned with a fragment of Roman sculpture that extends its features, creating a figure at once hybrid and amorphous, yet forming a physiognomic whole that feels strangely familiar. The assemblages in Frictions restage this process across multiple variations, consistently bringing together two key elements: Greco-Roman sculpture and the African “mask.” At times, carved wooden sections join sculpted heads; at others, fragments of statuary are affixed to wooden objects, shaped and patinated by hand. Alongside these sculptural works, a group of drawings further develops these encounters, translating the same formal and conceptual tensions onto paper.

From these encounters arise dissonant variations, frictions in the sense described by Édouard Glissant1. The works strain inherited taxonomies: white sculptures and Black masks — the former housed in archaeological museums; the latter relegated to ethnographic collections. Clean cuts through wood or marble heighten the feeling of a forced, discordant union. Yet continuities emerge: features flow from one fragment to another, sometimes mirroring each other, unsettling the cultural register that elevates some forms as artistic models while dismissing others as “naïve art.” In doing so, the work challenges anatomical rationality and seeks to break free from a coercive representational system.

The first Frictions assemblage was made from fragments unused in earlier installations. It features the head of Roman emperor Caracalla, a copy of the Farnese bust likely carved around 212 CE, found in the Baths of Caracalla and now at the National Archaeological Museum of Naples. The mask is likely a replica of a Dan wooden sculpture from Ivory Coast. In the same year, Caracalla issued the Constitutio Antoniniana, granting Roman citizenship to all free men in the Empire, marking a major milestone in Roman history. Fascist historiography later cast this edict as Rome’s downfall, giving citizenship to all conquered peoples, claiming it enabled the rise of a “lower race” and promoted miscegenation, seen as a source of physical and moral decay. The first issue of La Difesa della Razza (1938) exemplifies this: with a photo of Caracalla’s bust facing Augustus's bears the caption, “The somatic traits of the semi-barbarian Caracalla sufficiently illustrate the main motive of his ruinous edict.” This contrast reflects fascist beliefs that physical appearance reveals moral character: Caracalla, the “hot-tempered and bloodthirsty foreigner,” embodies decay; Augustus, balance and grandeur. Such interpretations of antiquity continue to shape contemporary debates in art, scholarship, and especially popular culture. Ridley Scott’s recent Gladiator II illustrates this: its Venetian-blond Caracalla, stripped of his African heritage, perpetuates myths about Africa and the so-called “good” Roman emperors.

In Chronicles of a Vagabond, Elyes Jeridi reconsiders the contemporary serial form through a cinematic dispositif grounded in movement and initiatory wandering. The film unfolds like an archaic narrative, beginning with a departure. A prologue gives way to six brief episodes, conceived as pauses or intervals along a continuum. Nothing comes to a halt; the work unfolds in relation to movement, voice, and the subtle resonance of images.

Drawing from diverse sources : everyday life, digital media and found footage, the film situates memory, narrative, and perception in dialogue, creating a fragile, immersive meditation on time, presence, and storytelling. Over this image track unfolds a voice-over that operates simultaneously as a narrative instance and a space for reflection. Spoken by the filmmaker, it adopts the position of the storyteller, a voice that observes, hesitates, and interrogates reality, engaging political, existential, and temporal questions.
Two figures emerge along the trajectory: a donkey and a penguin. Silent presences, framed as allegorical characters, they accompany the narrator within the shot and across duration. Like animal figures in fables and tales, they function as symbolic mediators. Through their presence, the intimate expands into the universal, and the personal takes on the shape of narrative.
Chronicles of a Vagabond asserts itself as a conceptual work that probes cinematic form while exploring memory and temporality, allowing images and words to engage in a continuous dialogue. At once fragile and shifting, the film unfolds as a contemporary fable, deeply alive, tracing the path of a man who moves forward, speaks, and resists.

Text by Nicene Kossentini

Exhibitions

STEEL GENETICS

A NEVER-ENDING MASQUERADE

OBLIVION RAINS: NOTATIONS OF GRAVITY, LIGHT, AND RESISTANCE

FRICTIONS

CHRONICLES OF A VAGABOND

HORTUS

WE KNEW HOW BEAUTIFUL THEY WERE, THESE ISLANDS

THE HOUSED BODY

LES GRAINES NOIRES | Black Seeds | البذور السوداء

ENGRAVINGS | GRAVURES

“I have lived on the land long before swords turned man into prey”

Nous trouverons un chemin, ou nous en créerons un

فكروني

Devotional Landscapes

YA'ABURNEE - يقبرني

Œuvres Tissées

Symbols and Forms

To Weave into Words and Films

Un bateau, sans naufrage et sans étoile

Miniatures

Fallen Archetypes

Sun Rays and Tiny Cubes

Et Si Carthage?

Fitzrovia Chapel : Revolutionary Myths, 2023

Through the Strata

Jelliz & Gestes

Pombajira

On a Rock, a Brief Circle of sun

Tumadhir's Walk

On a Rock, a Brief Circle of Sun

Over the Edge By Thameur Mejri

Untitled 2

La flamme germe

On a Blade of Grass

5 Collectors, 5 Rooms

Archaic Contingency

janna جنّة

En Tunisie

Ismaïl Bahri

Walking Targets

Untitled

Essaïda-Carthage

Le pas de côté

Les mains parallèles

Nos visages

Je me souviens des recommandations de M. le Président

Sculptures

Anthrôpos

Photographies

Graines de pensée

Narratives of Displacement

Triangulation

L'horreur du plein

Ce qui demeure

Unfolding Landscapes

Imagining Post-Truth

Le vent ne veut jamais rester dehors

Son, Don't Rush To Be A Man

Mnémé

Voice of The Border

Fissures

No Standing Anytime

Vingt fois sur le métier remettre l'ouvrage

Portée

The Universe Is Expanding

FABRICA 0464

Habba-Zaytūna

The Flight Of The Butterfly Or The Myth Of Icarus Revisited

Détail se dilate

Reflection

Portrait redux

Sculptures

Maritime Tales : Between Land & Sea

TGM