De quoi rêvent les martyrs 2

Nidhal Chamekh
Born in Dahmani, Tunisia, in 1985.
He lives and works in Paris, France, and Tunis, Tuinisia.

from left to right:
De quoi rêvent les martyrs 2, drawing 7
De quoi rêvent les martyrs 2, drawing 4
De quoi rêvent les martyrs 2, drawing 12

Somatic forms float freely on flat surfaces. Ultrareal severed human fingers made from resin, attached to a wall, bear gold-plated 9mm bullets at the tips. With such affective figurative language, Nidhal Chamekh offers poignant articulations of our material reality. Born to a family of prominent political activists on both his father’s and mother’s side, Chamekh obtained a BFA from the School of Fine Arts, Tunis (2008), and an MFA from Paris 1, Pantheon la Sorbonne, Paris (2010), where he is currently enrolled in a PhD program. Visually eloquent and sublimely gifted, Chamekh works in a wide range of media and art forms, including drawing, sculpture, video, and mixed media installation. His family’s history of political activism is a significant influence on his practice, which is focused on the historical and the political.
His groundbreaking De quoi rêvent les martyrs?, a series of twelve drawings on paper included in the Biennale di Venezia, calls attention to the events of the so-called Arab Spring of 2011. Produced at the height of the revolution and completed two years later, the drawings consist of anatomical/ scientific sketches of human body parts, image transfers, combined with Arabic scripts, animal heads on human forms, guns, and police batons, among other elements. Together they present a dystopian vision of political and social upheavals and their enduring aftermaths. Revolutions come at a steep cost in human and material terms. The dream of martyrdom is not always some jihad-inspired utopian imagining of fatalistic death. As an example, we can look to the fruit vendor whose act of self-immolation out of desperation on that fateful day of December 17, 2010, incentivized the masses that emptied into the streets of Tunis and kick-started the revolutionary wave of protests that spread through the Arab world. Another work by Chamekh, The Anti-Clock Project (2015), an object installation, reexamines the social function of public monuments, which are both symbolic forms of nation building and concrete reflections of political histories when they are hijacked to commemorate the self-serving agendas of political leaders.