In accordance with Chamekh’s redeployment of relegated narratives and agents of history, Mezoued with hands unfolds as a contribution to this scope. This assemblage of a traditional instrument hoisted by multiple hands historicizes a form of movement and performance related to cultural productions of marginalized communities.

Nidhal Chamekh seeks to translate, in his assemblages of heterogeneous elements, the dissonances, discontinuities and hybridisations that they contain. He is interested in how images, whether historical or current, are not static, but are rather constantly redefining and redeploying themselves across visual culture, literature, the natural and human sciences and other fields. While generally this redeployment acts to underpin and reinforce existing historical and political tropes, there is also a potential for this montage process to contribute to rethinking and reactivating the past in the present. One of the counter histories that Chamekh bring to the fore in the exhibition is that of Mezwed music as a form of marginalised cultural production that has been linked to exile in the songs of its leading exponents such as Hedi Guella, whose 1984 album Périples, features the compositions ‘Carte d’identité’, ‘Pays chagrin’ and ‘Le bateau de l’immigration’. Chamekh also points to its discovery by black jazz musicians including Don Cherry whose encounters with Mezwed musicians during a visit to Tunis are recorded in the film Noon in Tunisia (1969). Instruments associated with this musical form, a type of bagpipe and a drum, feature in the sculptures Crouching Venus with tabla and Mezoued and hands (both from 2024).