Nidhal Chamekh

Born in Dahmani (Tunisia) in 1965), Nidhal Chamekh is a visual artist.

Nidhal Chamekh is a graduate of Tunis’ Higher Institute of Fine Arts and the University of Paris-Sorbonne. He continues to work and live between the two cities. His work is situated at the crossroads of the biographical and the political, the lived and the historical, event and archive. It fragments, dismantles and dissects the constitution of our contemporary identity.

His work has been exhibited at the Venice Biennial, the Aïchi Triennial, the Architecture Biennial in Orléans, the Rencontres de Bamako, the Videobrasil Biennial, the Dakar Biennial and the Dream City Biennial in Tunis, and has been presented at the Arab World Institute in Paris, the Drawing Room in London, the FM Contemporary Art Center in Milan, MAC Lyon, Kunsthaus Hamburg, CCA Lagos and the Hood Museum among other venues.

The project he is working on at Villa Medici is entitled “Et si Carthage n’avait pas été détruite?” (And what if Carthage hadn’t been destroyed?). The idea is to take Édouard Glissant’s question literally and open up its historical, artistic and symbolic potential, focusing on the survival of relationships between Rome and North Africa and their historical resonance in the present day in terms of migrant “crises” and geopolitical tensions.

His artistic project seeks to introduce Rome’s archaeological heritage and the marginalised cultural production of the City’s exiles, in a process of montage in which present and past are jointly defined.