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 Glissant[1]. 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.

This sculpture, Frictions #6, includes a fragment of a Punu mask from Gabon grafted onto a facial detail of the Niobid Chiaramonti from the Niobids group at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.

[1] While Glissant primarily addresses the Creole cultures of the Caribbean, his notion of creolization extends further: a broader dynamic of formation and (re)birth born of cultural encounters — composite cultures that can only be voiced through the multiplicity of their origins.